New Orleans Suffers From Dearth of Caregivers

As one of its many legacies, Hurricane Katrina left a shattered health care infrastructure in New Orleans. According to Vangy Franklin, M.D., project manager for the City of New Orleans Health Department, just 15 percent of physicians who practiced in New Orleans before Katrina have returned to the city, and five of the city's health clinics no longer exist.

Prior to Katrina, the New Orleans health department was the safety net for a small number of people, noted Franklin. "Now, we are the safety net for most of the city of New Orleans."

Franklin's comments came during a meeting with volunteers at the New Orleans Health Recovery Week, a health fair that provided medical services to thousands of New Orleans' citizens during the week of Feb 6-12.

During the same week, an article (brief, free registration is required) in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans estimated the region's physician population might be as few as 1,200 from a high of more than 4,000 practicing physicians and 1,200 medical residents before the storm.

"The doctor shortage … is putting more pressure on the region's overtaxed hospital emergency rooms and aggravating an already bruised health-care industry," said author Keith Darce. He also noted that many of the physicians who have returned to the city are subspecialists rather than primary care physicians, which further exacerbates the problem of finding primary health care in the city.

In the article, Darce speculated that many younger physicians might not be willing to return to the city because of the costs associated with rebuilding. Although older physicians -- who are more vested in the area -- may return, many of them could find it difficult to rebuild private practices, according to Darce. "The effort is risky … because it could drain some doctors' savings or force them to borrow large amounts of money with no assurance that enough patients will return to make their practices profitable," he said.

Darce's article noted that some local physicians and hospital administrators are pushing Congress to "add New Orleans to federal programs that provide guaranteed salaries to those willing to work at specially designated health-care clinics in rural communities and on Indian reservations that have trouble recruiting physicians."

The article concluded that primary care physicians would come back to the city but only when they know they will have the patients to care for and the health care infrastructure to support their practices.