Tenet Healthcare Corporation is a for-profit multinational healthcare services company based in Dallas, Texas, United States. Through its brands, subsidiaries, joint ventures, and partnerships, including United Surgical Partners International (USPI), the company operates 65 hospitals and over 450 healthcare facilities. Tenet also operates Conifer Health Solutions, which provides healthcare support services to health systems and other clients.
Hurricane Katrina was a powerful and devastating tropical cyclone that caused 1,392 fatalities and damages estimated at $125 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. It is tied with Hurricane Harvey as being the costliest tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the contiguous United States, gauged by barometric pressure.
As the center of Hurricane Katrina passed southeast of New Orleans on August 29, 2005, winds downtown were in the Category 1 range with frequent intense gusts. The storm surge caused approximately 23 breaches in the drainage canal and navigational canal levees and flood walls. As mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965, responsibility for the design and construction of the city’s levees belongs to the United States Army Corps of Engineers and responsibility for their maintenance belongs to the Orleans Levee District. The failures of levees and flood walls during Katrina are considered by experts to be the worst engineering disaster in the history of the United States. By August 31, 2005, 80% of New Orleans was flooded, with some parts under 15 feet (4.6 m) of water. The famous French Quarter and Garden District escaped flooding because those areas are above sea level. The major breaches included the 17th Street Canal levee, the Industrial Canal levee, and the London Avenue Canal flood wall. These breaches caused the majority of the flooding, according to a June 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The flood disaster halted oil production and refining which increased oil prices worldwide.
Hurricane Katrina had many social effects, due the significant loss and disruption of lives it caused. The number of fatalities, direct and indirect, related to Katrina is 1,833 and over 400,000 people were left homeless. The hurricane left hundreds of thousands of people without access to their homes or jobs, it separated people from relatives, and caused both physical and mental distress on those who suffered through the storm and its aftermath, such as Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Ochsner Health System is a not-for-profit health system based in the New Orleans metropolitan area of southeast Louisiana, United States. As of 2021 it is the largest non-profit, academic healthcare system operating in Louisiana, with 40 medical facilities across the state. Its flagship hospital, Ochsner Medical Center, has been ranked the number one hospital in Louisiana for the past decade. It also has other clinics and medical centers in Greater New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Monroe, Lafayette, and other locations across Louisiana and Mississippi.
Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana was heavily damaged when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. In the aftermath of the storm, while the building had no electricity and went through catastrophic flooding after the levees failed, Dr. Anna Pou, along with other doctors and nurses, attempted to continue caring for patients. On Wednesday, August 31, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt reassured the public that 2,500 patients would be evacuated from hospitals in Orleans Parish, although it wasn't clear at first where they would be moved to.
Le Bonheur Children's Hospital is a 255-bed, tertiary care children's hospital located in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee. Le Bonheur has more than 700 medical staff representing 40 pediatric specialties. Approximately 170 patients per day are admitted, mostly from Tennessee and nearby states but also from around the world, mainly due to its nationally recognized brain tumor program, affiliation with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and for being the home of the Children's Foundation Research Center. The hospital treats infants, children, teens, and young adults aged 0–21.
Charles Carmen Foti Jr. is a lawyer in New Orleans and a politician who served a single term from 2004 to 2008 as the Democratic Attorney General of the U.S. state of Louisiana, United States. Prior to becoming attorney general, Foti had been repeatedly reelected and served for thirty years as Orleans Parish criminal sheriff.
The Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center New Orleans is a public university focused on the health sciences and located in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is part of the LSU System and is the home of six schools, 12 centers of excellence, and two patient care clinics. Due to Hurricane Katrina, the School of Dentistry was temporarily located in Baton Rouge but has since returned to its campus in New Orleans. As a public university, it mostly accepts residents of the state of Louisiana with the exception of combined M.D./Ph.D. students and also children of alumni.
University Hospital, most recently called Interim LSU Hospital (ILH), was a teaching hospital located in New Orleans, Louisiana. It closed on August 1, 2015, when all patients were moved to University Medical Center New Orleans. University Hospital was previously known as Hôtel-Dieu.
Charity Hospital was one of two teaching hospitals which were part of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans (MCLNO), the other being University Hospital. Three weeks after the events of Hurricane Katrina, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco said that Charity Hospital would not reopen as a functioning hospital. The Louisiana State University System, which owns the building, stated that it had no plans to reopen the hospital in its original location. It chose to incorporate Charity Hospital into the city's new medical center in the lower Mid-City neighborhood. The new hospital completed in August 2015 was named University Medical Center New Orleans.
Ochsner Medical Center – Kenner, also called Ochsner Kenner, is a hospital in Kenner, Louisiana, United States.
Children's Mercy Kansas City is a 390-bed medical center in Kansas City, Missouri providing care for pediatric patients. The hospital's primary service area covers a 150-county area in Missouri and Kansas. Children's Mercy received national recognition from U.S. News & World Report in 11 pediatric specialties. The hospital was the first in Missouri and Kansas to receive Magnet Recognition for Excellence in Nursing Services from the American Nurses Credentialing Center and has been re-designated five times.
As a result of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans, Tulane University was closed for the second time in its history—the first being during the American Civil War. The university closed for four months during Katrina, as compared to four years during the Civil War.
The Louisiana Superdome was used as a "shelter of last resort" for those in New Orleans unable to evacuate from the city when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005.
Lindy Boggs Medical Center, formerly known as Mercy Hospital and also known as Lindy Boggs Hospital, is a now-abandoned 187-bed acute care hospital operated by Tenet Healthcare located in Mid-City New Orleans, Louisiana. The hospital provided many services, including emergency care, critical care, and organ transplantation services. It was abandoned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a destructive Category 5 hurricane that hit New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29, 2005, causing extensive flooding, over 1,390 deaths in the city, and over $125 billion in damages.
Healthcare in New Orleans includes a combination of hospitals, clinics, and other organization for the residents of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American journalist Sheri Fink. The book details the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in August 2005, and is an expansion of a Pulitzer Prize-winning article written by Fink and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2009. It describes the events that took place at Memorial Medical Center over five days as thousands of people were trapped in the hospital without power. The triage system put into effect deprioritized critically ill patients for evacuation, and it was later alleged that a number of these patients were euthanized by medical and nursing staff shortly before the entire hospital was evacuated on the fifth day of the crisis. Fink examines the legal and political consequences of the decision to euthanize patients and the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia and health care in disaster scenarios. The book was well received by most critics and won three awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.
Cook Children's Medical Center is a not-for-profit pediatric hospital located in Fort Worth, Texas. One of the largest freestanding pediatric medical centers in the U.S., Cook Children's main campus is located in Tarrant County. The hospital provides comprehensive pediatric specialties and subspecialties to infants, children, teens, and young adults aged 0–21 throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth metro and the greater region. Cook Children's also has an ACS verified level II pediatric trauma center. The hospital has a rooftop helipad for the critical transport of pediatric patients to and from the hospital.
