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[ The Health-Care Work Force for Future Generations... ]

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By MARSHA SHULER

The health-care work force for future generations of Louisiana patients is in jeopardy too.

The state as a whole could be in trouble if medical and other health-care profession education programs dont get re-established in New Orleans. New Orleans had been the base for most of them.

The schools graduates generally stay in Louisiana, helping provide the states future physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, therapists and the like. The schools, both public and private, are struggling to come back and to retain students and faculty.

LSUs medical schools, as well as training facilities such as LSUs public hospitals, were damaged, many beyond repair.

LSU got its six professional schools from medicine to nursing to dentistry to allied and public health running in Baton Rouge within a months, with the assistance of federal officials.

LSU Chancellor Dr. John Rock said the potential for losing medical education programs and graduates led the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide a ferry to house students and faculty in Baton Rouge.

So far, theres been no major enrollment decline, Rock said.

But problems are looming without federal or other financial aid by January.

LSU has asked for a $98.4 million from the federal government to make up for the loss of revenues from its health-care service contracts at University, Big Charity and other hospitals shut down because of Katrina.

The biggest concern that I have is if we do not get some interim funding to maintain faculty salaries and work force and we lose our faculty, said LSU School of Medicine Dean Dr. Larry Hollier.

We would end up with no teachers and nobody to staff the (public) hospitals, Hollier said.

LSU is trying to move back to New Orleans in January and by that time have a trauma center and hospital beds open. But lack of funding could derail those plans.

The hurricanes also halted classes at other health training programs in the New Orleans area, said Larry Tremblay, associate commissioner of the State Board of Regents.

Affected were programs at Tulane, Loyola, Dillard and Xavier universities, Delgado Community College, Holy Cross College and several technical colleges, he said.

Tulane moved medical education programs to Baylor University in Houston, Tremblay said. Other schools that axed the majority of their programs for the fall are planning spring and summer sessions, he said.

The big unknown in all of this is how many of them (students) will come back and, if they come back, do they have a place to live, Tremblay said.

For the most part, schools that had graduating seniors doing on- the-job training have made arrangements to complete studies, he said.

For instance, Delgado had 189 senior nursing students in the final semester. Of them, 129 are working at East Jefferson and West Jefferson hospitals. Another 40 are elsewhere, inside and outside the state.

Xavier University has one of two pharmacy programs in the state. The schools dean is concerned because quality black pharmacy students look extremely attractive to any pharmacy school in the nation. He has concerns for poaching, raiding, Tremblay said.

Tremblay said before Katrina the Health Work Force Commission had been working to get more professors at nursing schools so they could accept more students. Nurses got financial assistance to go back to school to earn advanced degrees where they could teach.

This is going to throw a tremendous interruption into all this, and I dont know what its going to mean, he said.

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

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