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