Tampa General Hospital CEO shares advice on planning for weather emergencies | ViVE 2025

Nashville - Hospitals need to view planning for weather emergencies as a key element in their strategy, John Couris says.

In this area, he would certainly know. Couris is president and CEO of Tampa General Hospital, a health system that faces hurricanes all too often. During the ViVE conference, he urged other hospitals to deal with the reality of more potent weather threats due to climate change.

After his speech, he spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® to share some lessons in preparing for weather emergencies. He offered perspective for hospitals that are applicable across the country, whether they’re confronting hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, or other natural disasters.

“You need to be constantly planning,” Couris says. “This can't be sort of like, well, we focus on it four months out of the year, because that's when we're most vulnerable for natural disasters. Wherever you are in the country, you need to be constantly doing it.”

• Read more: For hospitals, preparing for climate change isn't optional

Couris stresses the need for planning over a period of years. Tampa General recently built a $53 million power plant, and such expenses need to be planned over time, he says.

“Those are big projects,” he says. “So you have to stage it. You have to plan it. That's what we do. And it takes lots of planning.”

Couris advises hospitals to be “very proactive” in planning for weather emergencies.

“Understand your priorities,” he says. “Patients and team members and physicians are your priority. Business interruption and providing care to the community uninterrupted is a priority. So, you have to understand what your priorities are.”

“Finally, planning for a disaster doesn't happen in a year or two or three,” Couris says. “You have to allocate resources, both from a capital and an operating perspective, each year. You have to build more resiliency into your physical plants and into your facilities and into your organization. That has worked really well for us in an area that is susceptible to all sorts of natural disasters.”

He acknowledges that it isn’t easy to devote resources to resilience, and he says that there can be difficult conversations about deferring other initiatives to invest in efforts to deal with weather emergencies.

“The most important thing we do is take care of our patients,” he says. “It's all about safety. It's about the safety of our patients, the safety of our team members and physicians, and making sure that we are ready to take care of our community, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Building a resilient campus, building infrastructure that can respond to whatever Mother Nature throws at us is critically important in that in that strategy, in that vision, because it's who we are, it's what we're about.

“Our vision statement is really simple. It's to be the safest and most innovative academic health system in America. That's a journey that we're on. Well, a big part of safety and innovation is resiliency, and it's resiliency around climate and what's happening with our climate,” he adds.

But he says the conversations can be uncomfortable when clinicians are pushing for patient care initiatives that have to be postponed for investments in resilience. Couris says it’s critical to candidly explain the rationale for putting resources into preparedness, even if other initiatives have to wait.

“People get angry about that and disappointed, yes, but the people, ultimately, at the end of the day, understand it,” he says.

• Read more: From hurricanes to wildfires, hospitals must plan for climate disasters