New Orleans Medical Center

The Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, widely known as Charity Hospital, was a public hospital whose teaching mission and commitment to treating patients regardless of their ability to pay made it a vital part of New Orleans’s medical landscape. During Hurricane Katrina, it faced flooding, power and infrastructure failures, and a prolonged evacuation involving roughly twice as many patients as Memorial Medical Center. Despite conditions at least as dangerous as those elsewhere, fewer than ten patients died, and staff described sustaining care and morale until the final transfers.

Public Mission and Medical Education

The institution, formally known as the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans and better known as Charity Hospital, served patients who might have few alternatives: people without health insurance, prisoners, and others unable to pay. Its teaching mission joined care with professional training. At the University of Texas Medical Branch, Anna Pou worked in a similar teaching-hospital arrangement, where patients—often poor—received treatment regardless of their ability to pay while medical trainees learned through clinical practice. When she later returned to New Orleans to join Louisiana State University’s faculty, her colleague Daniel W. Nuss’s program treated head and neck cancers at both Memorial Medical Center and Charity Hospital, including among prisoners and uninsured patients. Charity thus belonged not only to the city’s public safety net but also to the clinical and educational network in which specialists practiced across institutions.

The Katrina Evacuation

Charity’s crisis combined failures that made even basic hospital operations difficult. Flooding reached the hospital; power, functioning plumbing, computers, telephones, and elevators were lost. Unlike Memorial Medical Center, Charity had no helipad and no corporate overseers to assist with evacuation. It also held approximately twice as many patients across its two campuses as Memorial, with fewer staff relative to the number of patients.

The evacuation was not completed until Friday afternoon, September 2, a day after patients had been transferred from Memorial. The delay unfolded amid serious dangers and confusion: a gunman was reported on a nearby roof, waterborne convoys trying to reach the hospital were reportedly shot at and looted, and news reports incorrectly suggested the hospital had already been evacuated. Soldiers also brought additional patients dependent on ventilators to Charity. Staff continued caring for patients in their rooms while the evacuation proceeded.

Staff, Care, and Contrast

Accounts from Charity’s workers emphasized collective effort under pressure. Leaders held meetings every four hours in the lobby, bringing together staff from doctors to janitorial workers. Employees staged a talent show by flashlight; they painted and laughed. These practices accompanied ongoing patient care in a hospital without many of the systems ordinarily needed to provide it.

The outcomes made Charity a striking contrast to hospitals whose staff and patients faced similar or less severe threats. Although Charity had more patients, a lower staff-to-patient ratio, no helipad, and major infrastructure failures, fewer than ten patients died. The account does not reduce that difference to a single cause: workers pointed to morale and shared routines, while the record also foregrounds the institution’s difficult circumstances and the staff’s continued presence with patients.

Place in the Disaster’s Institutional Record

Charity’s experience complicates any simple equation between greater danger and greater loss of life. The hospital’s delayed evacuation and compromised facilities were grave, but its staff’s continued bedside care and efforts to maintain morale distinguish the public hospital’s response from the events under investigation at other New Orleans institutions. Its history in the account is therefore both institutional and comparative: a teaching hospital serving people often excluded from ordinary access to care, tested by a disaster that exposed how much evacuation and survival depended on the organization of care as well as on equipment and transport.