Leadership That Shows Up: Dr. Frances Stewart on Katrina, Care, and Planning That Works

Welcome back, dear colleague!

In Part 2 of our latest Courageous Conversations episode, Dr. Frances Stewart takes us inside the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: what failed, what moved care forward, and why leadership presence mattered more than any written plan.

This conversation offers grounded, practical insight for anyone leading through crisis: how to work when conditions collapse, how to stay visible when people need direction, and how to build planning capacity instead of relying on binders that won’t survive first contact with reality.

She also traces how those experiences reshaped her clinical path: from integrative care to mind–body tools and ultimately toward advocacy when clinical excellence alone couldn’t reach the upstream forces shaping her patients’ health.

What You’ll Hear

Plans are brittle; planning is a capability.

Katrina revealed a simple truth: static disaster plans break under real conditions.
Teams that made progress weren’t the ones with the thickest binders, they were the ones running rapid loops of decide → act → check → adapt.

Leadership presence multiplies performance.

Morale plummeted when senior leaders stayed out of sight.
It shifted the moment a visiting commander walked the ship, talked with people face-to-face, and shared candid updates. Presence combined with honesty outperformed any distant loudspeaker announcement.

Operational fit matters more than intent.

The hospital ship wasn’t designed for the actual needs on the ground: helicopter-first intake didn’t match the civilian crisis, and storm damage added more barriers.
The team improvised a land-based clinic in a shopping mall: right care, wrong container, so they changed the container.

Disaster leaves a human imprint and a systems lesson.

Marked homes. Empty neighborhoods. Responders everywhere.
The scale of human disruption shifted Dr. Stewart’s work from treating individuals to also strengthening system-level preparedness.

When clinical tools hit a ceiling, widen the toolkit.

Many patients weren’t improving with conventional care alone.
Integrative approaches, including mind–body tools and medical acupuncture, became essential for PTSD, depression, and chronic pain.

From excellent care to broader determinants and advocacy.

Even the best integrative care couldn’t touch environmental and social drivers of illness.
That gap pulled the work upstream, toward community partnerships, policy change, and advocacy coaching.