New Orleans health care is still in shambles:
While emergency care is available, auditors noted that patients at two hospitals waited up to two hours to be unloaded from ambulances. They also found patients being kept and treated in the emergency room because beds weren’t available elsewhere.
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That is no different from many other parts of the country under normal conditions. It is routine that patients stay 1-3 days in the ER because there is no beds.
From the article:
[CMS] Leavitt spokeswoman Christina Pearson said the secretary has met regularly with state officials to hear how they would like to see the health care system improved, and he sees opportunities to make the system better than it was before the hurricane struck, particularly through the use of health information technology. She did not have a timetable for when those improvements would be proposed.
Doctor’s are still seeing people in tents.
There are no operating ER’s in the downtown, French Quarter, etc.
Before we get to technology, just having resonable facilities is needed.
This Washington Post article is laughable. This is no different then Emergency Departments everywhere in the country, but since New Orleans is under a microscope, it gets alot of publicity. My city received a grade of “D” for Emergency Care in a recent study, and it was one of the highest grades in the study. We routinely have 17 hour waits for emergency care, and every few months a patient dies in the waiting room. The patients have adapted: they return to the ER at 4 am after spending the day in the waiting room and never getting in. Usually if you show up at 4 am you will be seen by 7 am.
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