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Callaloo 29.4 (2007) 1448-1451

Andre DuPlessis
with Charles Henry Rowell

ROWELL: What do you do at the Tulane University Hospital?

DUPLESSIS: I'm Chief Operating Officer for Tulane-Lakeside Hospital in Metairie, Louisiana. Basically, my responsibilities are to manage the hospital and make sure that it runs efficiently and provides safe patient care. As part of the management team at Tulane, I help set strategy, develop budgets, assign resources, and manage our employees.

ROWELL: You are in a good position to discuss for us the status of hospital service or the conditions of hospitals, as well as the impact of Hurricane Katrina on hospital culture in New Orleans. Will you talk about what you see as that general impact of the hurricane and then the flood? I'm seeing those as two different things.

DUPLESSIS: Being from southern Louisiana, you know that all the hospitals have hurricane emergency plans in place. We've been through this many, many times. We all know what to do, how to plan, but obviously Katrina was a storm that was bigger than any of us could have anticipated. Our hospital is located in Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish. We did not have any flooding. There was flood water outside of the hospital from the driving rain, but we weren't impacted by the levee breaches, and the water didn't come into the hospital. So, our planning worked like a charm and we executed our disaster plan flawlessly. We had ample supplies of medications, food, water, flashlights; we had generator fuel, diesel fuel. We weathered the storm pretty well with minor wind damage. But the city ended up flooding, due to the levee breaches and we decided to evacuate everyone from the hospital. We could have sustained our operations for another five days, but after five days we would have had to replenish all of our supplies, including our fuel for our backup generator. Our water would have run out, the sewage had already gone out. We were already having problems flushing the toilets. So we made a decision to temporarily shut down the hospital, and evacuate our patients and staff until we could better determine the status of the city and bring in reinforcements for the staff. In sum, we weathered the storm pretty well and then we closed down, but within thirty days we got back up and running.

The post-Katrina healthcare environment in New Orleans still remains extremely fragile. Right now there are only three hospitals that are open in Orleans Parish: that's Tulane, [End Page 1448] our sister hospital Tulane University Hospital and Clinic; Touro Infirmary; and Children's Hospital. That's it. All the other hospitals that were flooded and closed down and remain closed down and are not even close to reopening, with the exception of University Hospital, which is a member of Charity Hospital System. Charity Hospital, which took care of the indigent patients, remains closed. The hospitals that are currently open are shouldering the burden as well. So, consequently, ERs are jam-packed: there are long waits, beds are full, and you have a number of doctors that have left the city for good. We've heard numbers as much as fifty percent of the doctors are no longer in the city. One of the biggest issues is the mental health providers in New Orleans and around the state are greatly reduced. We still have a lot of issues to deal with here. And our delivery system is still shaky.

ROWELL: What does it mean not to have Charity Hospital operating now? If the majority of the people returned to New Orleans in the near future, what does it mean not to have Charity Hospital

DUPLESSIS: Charity Hospital served two purposes: it was a safety net for indigent patients and people without insurance, but it also served as the training grounds for both Louisiana State University and Tulane University medical schools. LSU and Tulane are doing an incredible job of maintaining and continuing their programs...

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