Nurses call state of NOLA (New Orleans) healthcare "horrific."

Source: Workers Independent News

Nurses call state of NOLA healthcare "horrific."

Lede: Horrific. That’s how nurses describe health care in New Orleans. Doug Cunningham has the story.

By Doug Cunningham

: “The health care system in new Orleans is alarming. It’s at a point where it’s beyond anything that I could have comprehended. The desperate need for mental health care. It’s just overwhelming. It's horrific.”

The Registered Nurse Response Network is sounding the public health alarm in New Orleans today in a city where working and poor families face a frighteningly inadequate health care system. Celeste Lewis is an RN who volunteers with St. Anna’s Medical Mission.

: “With St. Anna’s I volunteer. We go out in a converted RV to different areas of the city to provide primary care and health promotion. When you’re getting your primary care from an RV, that’s not a good indication that the government has really stepped in to support the health care infrastructure.”

New Orleans has 1,000 fewer health care beds, 6,000 fewer caregivers, and seven fewer hospitals than before Hurricane Katrina.
Lewis says there’s a tremendous need for health care, and the government has totally failed to provide an adequate public health system in New Orleans.

Read more: http://www.laborradio.org/node/5861

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was called Hurricane Raygun.

My heart goes out to the families in NOLA dealing with this. It's dangerous and it doesn't get better on it's own. :(

help would have been provided in no time.

Making people rely on charity and NGO-styl;e care is the goal here. Everything that gets done by "volunteers" is one less thing the gubbmint has to provide. It's all part of the grand plan to skim off all our resources.. Heaven forbid that health care would be 'wasted' on the poor :puke:

Jazz Fest goes on, the city recovers, but there's a neurosis underneath. No one - NO ONE - who lived through Katrina, the evacuation and aftermath escaped unscathed.


Friday we had a heavy rain. The newly installed pumps - failed. There was street flooding.

The incompetence is symptomatic of a greater disease in the country.

The pumps DID NOT fail. In fact, they over=performed to the point where it filled one outflow canal to the capacity and the Army Corps asked Jefferson Parish to stop pumping for a while.

The other remaining issue is storm drains that are blocked or filled with debris and their flow is reduced. There was street flooding (I got water in my Jeep on Magazine) but it was unrelated to pump performance. It was related to insufficient outflow capacity in the Canal because parts of New Orleans got rain equivalent to 80% of their KATRINA totals in less time! And as New Orleanians, we know that a few times a decade it rains like this, and it always floods like this. Only the usual suspects flooded (basements and storefronts), and only the inexperienced suffered through flooded cars as a result of not knowing where to park when the forecast calls for rain.

The status of the levee systems and the pumps, while not yet acceptable, is in EVERY possible way you can measure bigger, better, stronger and more redundant than our pre-Katrina system. And I say this as someone who is HUGELY critical of the recovery effort thus far, and as someone who works in the recovery effort everyday(PRIVATE, NOT CONTRACT OR GUBMENT).

The levees are bigger, the pumps have more capacity and work now (no more cavitation), there are completed locks that are almost fully operation at the head of the canals into Lakeview, shutting flood access to two of the major breeches that flooded New Orleans proper.

The 9th Ward where the Industrial Canal breech was is completely armored and repaired, and the levees all the way to Venice are in place already, and planted.

Things are still bad, but we are getting better.

Sure it was to "capacity" but 4.5 feet is far from full. The paper thin walls there can't be trusted.

At capacity, but not full?

:shrug:

The walls are indeed too thin...and with the neighbors likely to fight an eminent domain taking for widening the walls (like those selfish pricks in Lakeview), it isn't likely to get wider.

When the city was at its heyday, there were hundreds of miles of canals in the city to keep it dry...perhaps we should have kept one or two more.

It's this nazi govt.'s wish to kill off as many citizens as possible. And they wonder why they're called nazis. :eyes:

starting with our soldiers, and the environment.

Got melamine pork too!!!