Starting over on common ground: Care must go on

A little more than a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City, physicians and the Louisiana health care system continue to rebuild.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Sept. 25, 2006.

Most hospitals in New Orleans remain closed, victims of floodwater from Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of area doctors are scattered across the nation. At the small number of hospitals, clinics and other facilities that managed to reopen, physicians struggle to revive a crippled health care system more than a year after Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast.

Common Ground Health Clinic is one facility using what it can to meet the community's medical demands. Started after the storm, the clinic now operates in a former corner grocery, helping to mend an ailing city buckled by the hurricane's punch. In a building where curtains separate exam rooms, Ian Newmark, MD, and other volunteer physicians practice primary care, tending to patients with diabetes and hypertension and college students who volunteered to tear down abandoned homes but ended up with rashes.

"I realized they still need a lot of help. The health care system for the people in New Orleans is really broken. It's a catastrophe," said Dr. Newmark, chief of critical care medicine at Plainview Hospital in Plainview, N.Y., who volunteered for a week in August.

Of the 617 primary care physicians in New Orleans before Katrina, an estimated 140 returned to practice, according to a study in the Aug. 2 JAMA. Of the 196 psychiatrists, 22 continued to practice, the study said.

And even though the Louisiana Health Care Redesign Collaborative, a group working to help develop a new health care system, estimates a 35% drop in population since Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, the group said there still are not enough primary care physicians, psychiatrists or dentists to treat the Medicaid and uninsured populations.