Shuttered Hospitals Ensure Slow Recovery in New Orleans

Source: nytimes


July 24, 2007
Patchwork City
Shuttered Hospitals Ensure Slow Recovery in New Orleans
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.

On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors’ offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.

Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.

“I’ve been telling people, don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,” said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs. ....



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24orleans.html?th&emc=th

it is hell on earth w. long waits for care even if you are relatively healthy -- not just orleans and jefferson but we're having horrible waits in st. tammany too, you see your doctor like 2 minutes tops and there is simply no time to get questions answered, it's a damn assembly line

as for oschner in jeff, my experience was that waits were long even before the storm for non-emergency care, sometimes several hours, and i think the guy is exaggerating when he says waits were only 20 minutes before the storm -- the place was chaos before (despite the stores and the piano) and i'm afraid to go there now