NYT: Patients Needing Care Overwhelm New Orleans's Hospital System

[DeepModem Mom]

Patients Needing Care Overwhelm New Orleans's Hospital System
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: January 23, 2006


NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 18 - The emergency rooms of this bedraggled region are facing their own emergency. As thousands of residents have begun returning in the weeks since New Year's, there are far more sick people than there are doctors, nurses, beds and equipment to take care of them.

The slow repopulation of the city picked up speed after the holidays as more schools reopened and, in the words of one emergency room doctor, the sicker people began to return. But only seven of what had been 15 adult acute-care facilities in the city and three surrounding parishes are open, and only one-third of the acute-care beds.

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of doctors and nurses never returned to New Orleans after the flood; long-term and psychiatric hospitals, not to mention hospices and rehabilitation centers, are now almost nonexistent in and around the city.

As a result, the returning residents have filled the functioning hospitals in and immediately around the city to capacity and beyond. Waiting times in emergency rooms have extended to as much as six hours, medical personnel at three hospitals reported....

***

The city's sickest residents were among the first to leave New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and should be the last to return, but that is not happening, said Dr. John Wales, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at East Jefferson, which for days has had more patients than it has beds. "I think they're coming back and the doctors who took care of them are not around," he said....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/national/nationalspecial/23health.html

[uppityperson]

1. The infrastructure must be rebuilt.

Food, shelter, educational facilities, healthcare, power, water, roads, jobs....

[ninkasi]

3. Yes, it should...

and rebuilding should take precedence over tax cuts for billionaires. We are talking about human beings, with lives, and families, and feelings. I realize Dubya can't understand that we peasants have actual lives, which are as important to us as his life is to him, but it's true. He's willing to spend trillions to "spread democracy" in the Middle East. If democracy is indeed the ultimate system of government, then we must lead by our example, rather than by force.

Reading newspapers can tell the rest of the world how broken our system of government really is. They can tell about the widening gap between rich and poor; they can read about how many people lack health insurance; they can read about how our jobs are shipped overseas, with our government doing nothing to stop the tide of outgoing jobs; they can read about how many of our citizens are imprisoned...bombs and bullets will not spread democracy. Example, which we cannot now provide, is what would do the trick.

New Orleans will be an example to the rest of the world about how broken our system of democracy is under Bush's control. Why would other countries want to travel the same rocky road?

[nickyt]

2. ...and then there's this:

Charity given 11 days to vacate Convention Center

11:08 PM CST on Friday, January 20, 2006
Jonathan Betz / WWL-TV News Reporter


The Convention Center announced Friday plans to push out Charity Hospital’s temporary trauma center located on its premises.

http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl012006jbcharity.22cba5bf.html

I pray some people are down there with video cameras capturing the reality of this nightmare for the rest of this country to see....man, just cobble the footage together and get some funky documentaries out SOON.

[uppityperson]

4. oh my. It is a mess.

not enough hospitals, and where they have temp center set up must close so the convention center can again be doing convention center stuff. Oh lordy. Thank you for this article, I had missed this.