Dr. Karin Price, Chief of Psychology at Texas Children’s Hospital

This episode features Dr. Karin Price, Chief of Psychology at Texas Children’s Hospital, who shares how the hospital is responding to the recent Central Texas floods by supporting employees, patients, and the broader community. She highlights strategies for behavioral recovery, emergency preparedness, and the importance of long-term trauma care and community resilience.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm Mariah
Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to be
interviewing Karen Price,
chief of psychology for Texas Children's Hospital on
the podcast today. Karen, thank you so much
for joining me. Now as probably all of
our listeners have heard, there's been some pretty
devastating flooding down there in Texas. And I

(00:20):
know Texas Children's has been really on the
forefront of trying to help those communities as
they both recover from what's happening and process
everything that's gone down in these communities.
And I really just wanna kind of understand
what you all have been seeing in the
last few weeks after these floods hit. So
can you share a little bit about

(00:41):
kind of what you've all been doing in
these initial weeks from your perspective
kind of services,
the way your staff have been impacted,
and then how you've been involved on the
ground?
Absolutely. So, unfortunately,
we here at Texas Children's have had experience
with disaster response, thinking about hurricane Harvey back

(01:02):
in 2017,
of course, with the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and then, the school shooting here in Uvalde,
Texas.
We've had the opportunity to really,
think through our strategy and think through the
best way to impact our community and to
share information.
So one of the things that we've learned

(01:23):
is that there are a lot of very
well meaning people and organizations that jump in
to help in the immediate aftermath of a
disaster, which is wonderful.
But sometimes even to the point of oversaturation.
And we definitely saw this with the Central
Texas flooding where,
the different community organizations needed to ask people
to stop sending
physical donations and stop kind of coming into

(01:46):
the counties because it was impeding the relief
efforts.
And so really what we have learned at
Texas Children's is that that's the time that
we need to spend,
first really having an immediate response of compassion
and support,
for the community, but also really for our
employees. So here in Houston at Texas Children's

(02:08):
Hospital, we have about 20,000 employees, some of
whom were directly impacted and some of whom
are are figuring out how to talk with
their children and their friends and their neighbors
about what happened. And some of them are
trying to figure out how to talk with
their patients,
who are coming to see them about what
happened. So
our first immediate response is to to share

(02:28):
our compassion and support for the community
and then to really make sure that we
are sharing education
and resources, whether that's through the media
or through,
live presentations on social media.
Sometimes it is doing education with our medical
partners and our pediatrician partners who are on
the front lines of seeing lots and lots

(02:48):
of kids every day.
And the idea is that we spend some
time partnering with community organizations
and having discussions
about the needs on the ground, both immediate
and anticipated.
That way,
after many other resources are redirected
and as life gets back to normal for
those who aren't immediately impacted,

(03:10):
we want to be there to fill the
gaps and address the needs in the long
run.
Perfect.
Now while
physical rebuilding is underway, I know that the
emotional and kind of behavioral recovery process can
span quite a bit of a longer time
frame. What mental health or psychological support initiatives
has your system implemented to help families and

(03:31):
staff navigate this phase?
So one thing we've been doing, as I
mentioned, is just spreading a lot of information
about how to talk with children who have
experienced this trauma,
how parents
can take care of themselves as they support
their children,
how we can
talk to our patients and talk to our
neighbors and our community members about

(03:54):
coping skills, how to know what responses
children might have that are typical or normal
for somebody that's gone through a trauma,
and what are some signs that a child
might need,
professional help.
We then have offered immediate availability
for,
trauma and grief services
through our traumatic stress and resilience program

(04:16):
here in Houston as well as at our
Austin campus.
We have availability for immediate appointments in person,
but also through telehealth so that families who
are impacted
have that immediate access to a professional. So
all of that is really about
what our response has been to date, but
it's also anticipating
the different things that are coming up and

(04:38):
planning for those things ahead of time.
Perfect.
And then kind of looking at the broader
nation, I think we've all seen kind of
an increase of these sorts of climate related
disasters, and it feels like flooding particularly
is much more common. So what preparedness strategies
or response protocols from your system do you
believe could help serve as a model for
other health care organizations?

(05:00):
I think the first thing we've done is
really identify teams and team members who are
available to be part of that emergency outreach.
What happens is if you're in a busy
professional place like we are, everybody's schedules are
full to the brim. We're always working hard
to ensure access to all of our services.
But if you don't have an emergency outreach

(05:21):
team, what ends up happening is when you
do have a crisis, you're pulling people away
from their
regular patient care activities. And so in order
to have that availability
for fast response,
you need to have people identified as being
on emergency outreach teams. It really helps to
have a mobile team. For example, here at

(05:42):
Texas Children's, we have a mobile behavioral health
unit, a vehicle that can travel to different
locations and offer therapy services on-site in a
private,
and stigma free environment. So those things are
really important ahead of time to make sure
that you have those people identified and that
those
providers have the right expertise

(06:02):
in providing trauma care, providing grief care, and
making sure that, they're having the correct
developmental approach to helping kids of different ages
to deal with these,
very difficult issues.
The other thing I would say is that
we need to really be engaging with our
community in a continuous way,

(06:24):
in terms of building community resilience ahead of
disasters.
And related to that, really building communication
mechanisms for us to gather real time information
about needs that might be occurring, whether that
is
in schools or school districts, whether that's in
places of worship, community organizations.

(06:44):
Different camp associations have been reaching out to
us, really thinking about what happens when,
children and camp counselors who are at camp
now sort of leave what they call their
camp bubble and come back into the real
world,
and have to deal with all of the
information that we are are having shared with
us on a daily basis. That's truly

(07:06):
heartbreaking and tragic. I think we need to
think about what happens when kids go back
to school and for those that are directly
impacted, maybe some of their classmates are not
there
or they are
interacting with siblings of children that passed away
or families that have been directly impacted.
And then down the line thinking about even

(07:26):
next year when it's time for kids to
go away to camp, how are we going
to help children and families cope with the
stress that comes with that?
Some really good advice.
Well, thank you so much for being here
today and sharing everything you all are doing
there at Texas Children's.
I know your communities have definitely appreciated your
support, and we here appreciate you sharing all

(07:47):
of the great work that you're doing down
there. So thank you for joining me on
the podcast today. Thank you.