Louisiana State University

Louisiana State University was both a place of professional formation and, later, the university employer through which surgeon Anna Pou returned to New Orleans. Its connection to Memorial Medical Center joined public-university faculty employment with private-hospital practice: the arrangement supported Pou’s move and helped Memorial qualify for additional Medicare funds, but the available account presents the university primarily as an employer and training institution, not as the commander of the hospital’s hurricane response.

Education and Professional Formation

Pou began at Louisiana State University as a pre-med student, then changed direction against her father’s advice. She became a medical technologist in a hospital laboratory, running tests for infections. Her father believed she would not be satisfied in that work. A few years later, after friends had seen her take charge when a young man nearly drowned at a party, Pou recognized that laboratory work did not fulfill her and applied to medical school. She was accepted at Louisiana State University at age thirty; her father and uncle had also trained there.

That return marked a consequential turn in Pou’s career, but not a straight passage from university training into a single institutional role. She completed a surgery internship in Memphis and then trained in otolaryngology, the specialty concerned with the ear, nose, and throat, at a demanding residency program in Pittsburgh. Her subsequent work centered on head and neck cancer, bringing her expertise into the university’s clinical faculty and into hospital practice.

Faculty Appointment and Clinical Network

Pou’s eventual return to New Orleans grew out of a professional relationship with Daniel W. Nuss, the head of otolaryngology at Louisiana State University. They had met at national meetings of their specialty. Nuss’s private practice was at Memorial Medical Center, where he had developed a program for treating tumors and reconstructing affected areas. The program also served patients at Charity Hospital, including prisoners and people without health insurance. Nuss had repeatedly asked whether Pou would consider moving back to New Orleans; when she was ready to leave Texas, the opportunity aligned with her clinical interests and her ties to the city.

Nuss and the dean of the medical school formally invited Pou to join the faculty. She accepted in April 2004. On September 1, 2004, she began work as an associate professor in New Orleans and started seeing patients the following month. The appointment therefore connected academic employment with active patient care rather than placing Pou solely in a teaching or laboratory role.

The Memorial Agreement

Louisiana State University employed Pou and provided her liability insurance, while Memorial made a substantial financial contribution to securing her move. The hospital advanced the university more than $350,000 for Pou’s first-year salary and expenses, with the payments guaranteed against her future earnings as a surgeon. In return, she joined Memorial’s medical staff and took emergency-room call there without additional pay.

The arrangement linked institutional interests on both sides. The university’s repayment obligation depended on the guarantee payments and Pou’s future earnings; Memorial, owned by Tenet Healthcare, gained a university physician on its staff and thereby qualified as a teaching hospital eligible for additional Medicare funds. Pou’s appointment was intended to be permanent: her husband, Vince Panepinto, bought a house near the hospital in November, and the couple sold their home in Galveston in early 2005. These details show how faculty recruitment, clinical service, household relocation, and hospital financing converged in the move.

The University’s Place in the Katrina Narrative

When Memorial confronted the approaching floodwaters, the immediate command-room response described in the account belonged to hospital personnel. ICU nurse manager Karen Wynn recalled that Susan Mulderick’s warning transformed the atmosphere into something like a military operation, with the staff trying to act before power failed. The hospital’s evacuation and patient-care decisions unfolded within Memorial; the available evidence does not describe Louisiana State University directing those decisions or supplying the rescue operation.

The university nevertheless remained relevant to the institutional setting of Pou’s work. It had hired her, insured her, and placed her in a clinical relationship that included Memorial’s emergency room. Later, Mulderick told investigators that prescriptions already seized from Memorial’s pharmacy showed that Pou and other doctors had been prescribing ordinary comfort medications during the disaster. That account concerned prescribing at the hospital, not a university policy or order. The distinction matters: Louisiana State University appears in the episode through Pou’s education, faculty position, and employment arrangement, while the described operational authority and contested medication decisions belonged to the hospital setting.

The book offers a similarly bounded picture of the university’s relationship to the investigation. Michael Morales had followed court filings concerning Pou’s conversations with a Tenet attorney, but his account describes jurisdictional distance among investigative offices, not Louisiana State University involvement. The university’s significance in this narrative is thus structural rather than investigative: it helped bring a specialist back to New Orleans and linked academic medicine to a private hospital whose disaster response later became the subject of scrutiny.