Episode Summary:

This week, Shane interviews James Mitchell- the Director of Organizational Resilience at the 724-bed Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, TX. His responsibilities encompass Emergency Management, Business Continuity and Enterprise Risk. 

The last few months he has been heavily involved with a historic pandemic response at Texas Children’s which involved a 140+ day activation of their incident command system. And he graciously sat down with me so we could talk about how he approaches his program, the unique challenges healthcare presents to business continuity, and how he ensures his executive team is always aware and engaged. 

Key Points:

0:28min- James’ background

3:06min- How he got into healthcare Business Continuity

6:16min- Why this particular hospital started their program

8:00min- Overview of the program he’s created

10:43min- Approaching the BIA development through the lens of what's important during normal times vs hurricane events

12:22min- The approach he takes to building BC plans in a healthcare

15:30min- Using what he describes as an “internal consulting” model to BC 

17:20min- How to you keep plans fresh when time amongst staff is hard to get

19:07min- How the team approaches the testing of their plans

20:03min- Engaging leadership; How the structure of the program helps

21:45min- Participation increases due to a large scale hurricane exercise

22:47min- Is he lucky? Or is the secret sauce quality instead of quantity when executives are involved.

26:28min- The role of his BC program in non-traditional activities like COVID

31:10min- How did the BC planning actually get used during COVID

34:12min- Dealing with Hurricanes and COVID at the same time

37:00min- Tools James has implemented to help his program (Mass Notification, etc.)

Guest Bio:

James Mitchell has served at Texas Children’s Hospital for nearly five years and is the Director of Organizational Resilience. His responsibilities encompass Emergency Management, Business Continuity and Enterprise Risk. 

The last few months he has been heavily involved with a historic pandemic response at Texas Children’s which involved a 140+ day activation of their incident command system as well as a large scale response to some of the worst regional flooding ever to occur in the United States caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Prior to 2020, he led his team and organization in increasingly complex and more realistic exercises culminating in the development and execution of a series of large scale, multi-agency active shooter and mass casualty exercises that can be seen in the videos linked below.

Prior to Texas Children’s, James held roles at global companies such as BP (energy) and Invesco (investments) focused on development and integration of new teams and processes with responsibility for IT Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management and Business Continuity.

He loves the work he does and greatly respects all of those just starting out in this profession as well as those who have made it to the end and have such remarkable knowledge and insight to share.

Links:

LinkedIn 

Email

Some exercises which James and the team developed:

• Woodlands Active Shooter & Mass Casualty Exercise (March 2017)
• DeBakey & Texas Children’s Active Shooter & Mass Casualty Exercise (October 2016)