Tell us about your role and the teams you oversee.

I lead the work of safety and emergency management teams across our entire portfolio of businesses. That includes not just leading our team members, but implementing new processes and programs as well as strategic planning and team development.
 
We focus on three key areas: 

• Emergency Management: ensuring our hospitals are prepared for any and all types of disaster events, and remain operational during those events or as soon as possible following a disaster.
• Environment of Care: protecting the physical environment of hospitals, everyone and everything in it — that’s people, that’s the walls, the equipment, processes.

• Safety: ensuring the safety of patients, staff, anyone inside the walls of the hospital.

Describe the path you took to arrive in your current role.

I came to Medxcel from another healthcare organization where I worked in safety and emergency management for 18.5 years. I did a lot of operational work there and ran a lot of different departments, so I have a broader sense of how hospitals operate from that exposure. 

I came to Medxcel looking for a new opportunity. I started in a regional leadership role overseeing our safety and environment of care efforts for Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. As I moved into the national role, I've had various other markets roll up under me, but we have regional safety directors for each market. My counterpart, another national director, and I divide the markets.
 

Tell us about your teams and their responsibilities.

We have regional safety directors and they're team leads within each of the areas we serve. We also have regional emergency management officers, and they help lead the emergency management program within each area, reporting up to the regional safety director. We have three regional hazardous materials officers serving across all our markets, and then we have safety officers. They report up through their regional director and then each of the regions are assigned to me and my co-lead. Our teams are totally separate from the facilities management side but work very collaborative with the facilities management teams. Our teams are on site (at client facilities) alongside facilities management teams.
 

Describe your day-to-day responsibilities.

We identify, develop, and deploy what I call program work. Much of what our team does evolves out of some form of regulatory requirement. To be clear, we do what we do because it's the right thing to do, and a smart thing to do, but some regulatory requirement drives a lot of how we get there. 
 
The ligature risk assessment is a perfect example. It's very important for patient safety and it’s also a regulatory requirement, so we crafted a comprehensive ligature risk assessment tool that we have deployed and use in our partner hospitals. 
 
We deploy environment of care programs and those are very much driven by The Joint Commission as well as Life Safety code, and our teams craft those. Our regulatory program is very standardized, so if I go to a hospital in Texas, I should see the same body of work that I would see in Michigan or Florida or Tennessee. It’s going to have nuances specific to each market, hospital, size, and scope, but in the long laundry list of tasks and responsibilities, everybody's got the same list.
 

What types of career development and training opportunities does Medxcel offer to your team members?

All associates who join our team, regardless of experience level, complete our safety academy, which is a program our leaders and associates developed on their own. We also require OSHA 10 construction training for all our associates. We assign associates to that program within their first 90 days or so, and they have about six months to complete that. 
 
Once associates have gained the proper experience, we encourage them to pursue their Certified Health Safety Professional (CHSP) certification. We pay for all their training and annual renewals. There's also a Certified Healthcare Emergency Professional (CHEP) certification, which we also encourage and pay for. Additionally, we encourage associates to take advantage of trainings within their state as well as outside of their state, whether it's through The Joint Commission, their state hospital associations, or healthcare coalitions. 
 
We're very focused on giving our team the tools and knowledge to feel confident in their job and help remove any barriers to their success. We try to meet our associates where they are and if someone has a desire to get another certification, we want to help them do that. Some of our associates actively participate in our tuition reimbursement program to get higher level educational degrees, and we highly encourage that.