Lessons learned: Best Practices for Disaster Preparedness
TeamHealth administrators and physicians worked tirelessly to care for patients before, during, and after
hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Here, they offer some suggestions for disaster preparation and response:
Dr. Mary Haven Merkle, senior vice president of integrated services for TeamHealth West:
• Bring in enough clinicians to shelter in place in the hospitals, then do what it takes to get them relief.
Organize that same effort pre-emptively.
• Create robust two-way communications structure at all levels.
• Have a process to track down every employee until 100 percent are accounted for. Those calls from
TeamHealth did a lot to engender loyalty in our providers and employees, not to mention my own
peace of mind as a senior leader in Houston.
• Start elements of command and control off-site or be ready to take them off-site if the event is of
any length.
• Have ‘down-time’ procedures for schedule and payroll when usual procedures are disrupted.
• Support the creative and solution-oriented ER physician teams.
Rob Evans, executive vice president of TeamHealth Southeast:
• Make sure people have time off to go home, fix what was damaged, and have a mental reset
from everything.
• Be proactive; check and double-check resources.
• Learn from each event and apply that learning to your base of knowledge.
• Connectivity is vital. Be sure that you can get in touch with FEMA, federal agencies, local
government agencies, and executive leadership within the organization, at a moment’s notice.
Decisions have to be made very quickly, and being able to access those people or agencies
helps you translate those decisions into access on the ground.
Dr. Steve Schwartz, group president for TeamHealth Southeast:
• Begin preparing several days ahead of the storm.
• Have an organized checklist: supplies, generator integrity, supplies that staff sheltering at the
facility will need, etc.
• Even being able to tell someone that they can take their family, even their pet, to the hospital to
ride out the storm, and have the creature comforts they need, will result in the best possible
outcome for patients.
• Connect with healthcare entities in the community who may evacuate to your hospital. See if
they have generators and other supplies, and learn what their plan is if they flood or lose power.
• Use redundant communications, so if phone, video, text, or email-blast communication goes out
due to the storm, the others can allow effective communication to continue.
Matt Stapleton, executive vice president of TeamHealth Anesthesiology:
• Be nimble; expect the unexpected.
• Our command center team never said, ‘We can’t do that,’ or “That can’t be.” They said,
“We didn’t see that coming, but we will get it done.”
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