Memorial Medical Center–LifeCare Hospitals relationship

The Memorial Medical Center–LifeCare Hospitals relationship was one of shared space without unified operation: LifeCare leased hospital space inside Memorial, where its patients and staff occupied a distinct seventh-floor unit. During the Katrina emergency, the two operations became dependent on one another for evacuation assistance, yet decisions about transport and patient priority crossed organizational and clinical boundaries. Afterward, LifeCare’s leases at Memorial and another Tenet-owned hospital were not renewed, a development some LifeCare employees suspected was retaliation for cooperation with the investigation.

Shared Space, Separate Operations

LifeCare operated within Memorial rather than as a wholly integrated department of it. The book’s account distinguishes the seventh-floor LifeCare unit and its patients and families from Memorial’s broader hospital operation, while also identifying LifeCare administrators and nonclinical personnel as a separate group. Tim Burke, LifeCare’s New Orleans administrator, was not at the hospital for the storm; Steven Harris was its pharmacist. The arrangement put separate institutional structures under one roof, a distinction that became consequential when the building had to be evacuated.

Evacuation and Corporate Coordination

As the crisis unfolded, LifeCare initially looked to its own corporate or management structure to manage patient evacuation. When Memorial’s Sandra Cordray asked whether LifeCare needed assistance, its representatives initially said they were handling the matter through that structure. Acadian’s Keith Brisbois later recalled arriving soon after the evacuation decision to offer help and being surprised that LifeCare was waiting for its corporate office to address transportation. He believed Acadian held LifeCare’s transportation contract.

The delay did not define the entire response: text and email communications show that LifeCare personnel later requested evacuation assistance from Memorial, Tenet Healthcare, and Acadian. The sequence illustrates the practical cost of uncertain responsibility in a shared facility. Memorial’s emergency command was organizing a response to move nearly two hundred of its patients, while LifeCare’s own requests and transport arrangements had to be worked through a separate management chain.

A Shared Evacuation Boundary

The institutional divide did not shield LifeCare patients from decisions made in the emergency. Memorial doctors had established that patients with do-not-resuscitate orders would be evacuated last. On LifeCare’s seventh floor, Angela McManus learned that her frail, seventy-year-old mother, Wilda, also faced delayed evacuation because of a DNR order. Angela pleaded to rescind it, but staff told her no doctor was available to do so. Her encounter shows how a policy made within the wider hospital crisis could reach across the operational boundary into LifeCare’s unit, while the authority needed to change a patient’s order remained unavailable.

Aftermath and Lease Consequences

The relationship continued to have consequences after the storm. LifeCare’s leases at Memorial and at a Tenet-owned hospital in Kenner were not renewed. Some people who worked for LifeCare considered the decisions payback for the company’s cooperation with Attorney General Charles Foti’s investigation. The account presents this as their interpretation, not an established explanation for the nonrenewals. The leases’ end nonetheless marked a concrete separation after a crisis in which the organizations’ patients, staff, and evacuation needs had become inseparable in practice.