What happened after Katrina, did the interns and residents all get placed?

[vampire_D]

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What happened to all the Katrina affected hospital interns and residents after the storm settled? Did they all get transferred to different hospitals? How were they accomodated? I'm curious because our hospital just lost total accreditation and we have about 300 residents and interns in our hospital. I'm very worried that not all of us will get placed since there seem to be very limited openings for residencies anyways. The hospital lost accreditation, but we don't know yet about the status of acgme accreditation. King/Drew, Los Angeles.

 

[Blade28]

We had a few med students and residents transfer here.

 

[wes2308]

Which institution are you referring to? Are all the residency programs going to close?

 

[deleted109597]

Most, if not all, of those residents went somewhere else after Katrina. It depended on each situation.

King/Drew just got shut down. So those residents are scrambling. I can't imagine that they would have any trouble going anywhere.

 

[peptidoglycan]

I'm a Tulane medicine resident, so I can try to give you the scoop on what happened to people post-K. There were a lot of interim positions opened up around the country for people to take while we were getting back on our feet here in New Orleans. As of October (2005) , a lot of medicine residents were back in New Orleans working. By Christmas, the medicine program was fully returned. Between January and July, all the other residency programs at Tulane reconstituted themselves in full in New Orleans. Yes, some people transferred because their spouses lost their jobs or they were concerned because of the relative instability at the time, but most are back now. A lot of programs around the country opened their arms to people because of the tragedy of the storm, so spots were created that may not have truly existed. For those who were temporarily in other locations (up to 10 months), Tulane actually continued to pay their salaries, so a new position didn't have to be created (ie, funding didn't have to be found). Anyway, I'm so sorry to hear about the UCLA/Drew situation. I don't envy anyone having to find a new residency and I hope your PD at least tries to take care of you.

 

[surg]

While the past is no prediction of the future, the typical situation when a program shuts down before current residents will be able to graduate is that the program director of the shut down program puts out a mass ad to others in the specialty advertising their residents. The RRC will typically allow programs to expand temporarily to accommodate the displaced residents if they can show that they have the volume of patients to do so. Likewise the accepting hospital can temporarily exceed their GME cap to accept the new resident if the prior hospital is closing. Since King/Drew isn't closing (as of yet), it's a little unclear whether those things kick in yet. However, since King/Drew is no longer JCAHO accredited and ACGME requires that, it seems unlikely unless there is some way out of this mess (like a transfer of the programs to UCLA/Harbor's accreditation) that the ACGME will allow those programs to not stay open.

When the surgery program at King/Drew closed, I remember seeing the mass e-mail to our program director and I believe the bulk of them got placed reasonably rapidly, but then again, in surgery there is a significant amount of attrition at all levels so there are almost always a few mid level and upper level spots around the country. The people I'd guess who have real problems are those about to become chiefs since a good program often shies away from bringing in a chief resident level person.

Good luck to you and your classmates

 

[ekydrd]

We absorbed a 4th yr Med-Peds resident last year from Louisiana. I don't think it's too hard to do. Contact programs in areas you would be interested in relocating to and see if they can accomidate you.