Jim Davidson’s career in hospital leadership has taken him many places over the years, such as Massachusetts, Chicago, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

“I’ve unpacked a lot of boxes,” he said.

Since late 2019, Davidson, 60, has served as president and chief operating officer at Christus Ochsner Southwest Louisiana Lake Area and St. Patrick Hospital. Over the last two-plus years, he has navigated the unexpected challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the landfall of Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

Born in the Philippine Islands, he moved to the United States as a child and grew up in the Abbeville area. He remained around there and the Lafayette area until his late 40s.

In the early 1980s,  Davidson attended the Lafayette General School of Radiology Technology, and he landed a job in the field at what was then known as Hamilton Medical Center Hospital in Lafayette. Over time, his interest in working in leadership grew. He recalled being team captain while playing baseball and football in his youth.

“I felt like I had a calling for it,” he said. “I like to work with people and elicit the best out of them. That’s really what gets me my spark.”

Davidson took classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and eventually completed his coursework at the University of St. Francis, based in Joliet, Il. He took courses while still in Lafayette through an outreach program that partnered with local professors with specific degrees to administer the programs.

Davidson eventually earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in health service administration. He became associate administrator at Hamilton Medical Center after earning his bachelor’s degree and eventually left Louisiana in 2007 to work as vice president for St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Mass.

He spent nearly five years in Worcester before moving to the Chicago metro area to work as the chief operating officer for what was then Vanguard Health Systems. After the company was sold less than two years later, Davidson’s position was downsized and he rejected offers to move to Phoenix or Detroit. He took a job just outside Tulsa, Okla., as a hospital chief operating officer. In late 2015, he was promoted through the same hospital system to chief executive of a hospital in Russellville, Ark. He remained there until moving to Lake Charles in late 2019. Davidson is also a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Davidson said he and his wife, Julia, moved to Lake Charles for a couple of reasons. The city was a midpoint between his daughter Abby Smith, who lives in Katy, Texas, and Megan Richard, who lives in Youngsville. He said he also wanted to work in a faith-based medical facility.

“The fact that it was a two-hospital system here, I knew it was going to be a complex organization,” he said. “The joint venture partnership with Ochsner had  a dynamic to make it interesting. I didn’t want to sacrifice the interest of my work by having a layup and being at an easy kind of hospital.”

Little did Davidson know that within roughly three months of taking the job, the COVID-19 pandemic and related shutdowns would change everything. On the personal front, it made the transition to Louisiana life difficult because he and Julia were cut off from family, as well as the cultural and social aspects that motivated them to move back to the state.

Professionally, the learning curve associated with COVID-19 was steep for everyone at the hospital, Davidson said.

“Everything was new to me,” he said. “If you think you’re a leader that drops in and has all the answers, that myth was dropped three months in. A reliance upon each other and experts in their roles in the organization was paramount.”

During the early stages of the pandemic, Davidson said he witnessed a continued focus on treating patients.

“You see people who didn’t know what they were facing and they still provided care, not knowing if they were going to be taking something home with them,” he said. “It’s a well-worn sentiment that heroes came here with a lot of uncertainty, yet they plowed through.”

As the hospital continued to navigate the pandemic, Hurricane Laura’s landfall in August 2020 brought along additional challenges.

“COVID-19 and the hurricanes made for probably my toughest career transition ever,” he said.

Davidson said his home was spared of interior damages, aside from getting a new roof and rebuilding fences. Still, the size and strength of Hurricane Laura was an entirely new experience.

“The amount of ground this hurricane covered was new to me and probably to a lot of people who lived through hurricanes,” he said. “I remember as a boy playing football in a Category 1 hurricane and watching the ball sail through the air and get carried by the wind. No one I know has experienced a hurricane of (Laura’s) magnitude.”

Davidson said the fighting spirit of Southwest Louisiana residents is a quality he has observed since moving here.

“People are humbly resilient,” he said. “They just wake up and overcome. That’s an attractive thing that doesn’t get attention of the outside world. If there’s a problem, we’re going to fix it.”