Robbye Dubois

Robbye Dubois was LifeCare’s senior vice president for clinical services and the corporate executive who took charge of its disaster response as patients and staff struggled to leave Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. From Shreveport, she pressed for transport, disputed the assumption that LifeCare patients could wait while Memorial patients were evacuated, and tried to organize care beyond the hospital. Her efforts reveal both her persistence and the limits of a response fractured by unclear authority, unreliable information, and delays in getting help to the people who needed it.

Role and Position

Dubois had worked for LifeCare for many years and commuted between its corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas, and her home in Shreveport. Her senior role placed her in a position to coordinate across the company, but at the time of the crisis LifeCare’s management structure was in transition: an investment firm, The Carlyle Group, had acquired the company earlier that month, and several senior leaders were new. Her immediate superior, the corporate chief operating officer, was traveling, as were other members of the management team.

The crisis also exposed a gap between Dubois’s corporate responsibilities and the practical power available to her. She was away from Memorial, where patients were waiting for evacuation, and depended on staff there, colleagues in Shreveport, transport providers, and outside agencies for reports and action. Messages sent through a chat connection and calls made across strained lines became the means by which she tried to build a response in real time.

Advocating for LifeCare’s Patients

At Memorial, assistant administrator Diane Robichaux was coordinating LifeCare’s local response while also trying to manage patients at another LifeCare campus near the New Orleans airport. She sent Dubois a list of fifty-three LifeCare patients still at Memorial; two of the original fifty-five had died. Seven patients depended on ventilators, one needed an assisted-breathing device, and five required dialysis. Dubois believed that the helicopters going to Memorial were meant to evacuate both hospitals’ patients. She questioned why LifeCare, whose patients were generally very sick, should be left behind while less critical Memorial patients were moved first.

That expectation rested partly on confusing assurances from a contact whom LifeCare staff believed worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The contact said that federal and state officials knew about LifeCare’s situation and would evacuate ventilator-dependent patients, but could not give a time. Dubois urged Robichaux to keep pressing at the helipad and explain to the Coast Guard that LifeCare was a hospital operating inside Memorial and also needed evacuation. As the messages changed, however, the promised coordination remained uncertain. Memorial representatives told Robichaux that their own evacuation was being handled by the Coast Guard, not by the agency LifeCare thought had its patients on a list.

The confusion was more than a mistaken label. The contact, Knox Andress, was a nurse in Shreveport who volunteered as a regional hospital disaster-preparedness coordinator; he did not work for the federal agency. Yet Dubois and LifeCare staff continued to treat him as a channel to federal assistance. The episode shows how an unclear chain of communication could turn a hopeful report into an assumed plan without establishing who would actually send transport or when.

Taking Responsibility Without Waiting

Before the storm, Dubois’s new superior had questioned whether evacuating LifeCare’s Chalmette campus alone was enough and asked what additional support might be sent to the company’s other New Orleans-area campuses. Dubois replied that evacuations were not being recommended, that the campuses were staffed and supplied, and that she had identified staff who could travel from Shreveport. Once conditions deteriorated, she was unwilling to send more LifeCare employees into danger simply to relieve exhausted colleagues. She also considered hiring buses, but the idea did not appear to attract enthusiasm from her superiors.

Rather than wait for direction from a management team she did not trust to help, Dubois decided to lead the corporate disaster response herself, assisted mainly by a quality-management director and an information-technology specialist at the Shreveport hospital. She resolved to do what she could and seek permission afterward. Although her superiors might have had greater influence or resources, she felt she would not get help from them and did not turn to them for it. Her independence was therefore both a practical decision and a response to her perception of the company’s leadership at a moment when patients could not wait for corporate clarity.

Transport Plans and Their Reversals

Dubois tried to make a possible evacuation workable even if patients had to leave Memorial without a clear destination. She offered to arrange ambulances or Angel Flight transport from wherever helicopters dropped LifeCare patients, emphasizing the urgency for those dependent on ventilators or dialysis. When LifeCare’s staff later explored moving patients to a staging area outside New Orleans, she worked through Tenet Healthcare to arrange ambulances there, with critical patients intended to go first. The process took time, and rising water threatened to prevent trucks from reaching the hospital; patients were expected to begin moving the following morning.

The plan kept changing as evacuation decisions shifted. When Memorial wanted a list of ambulatory patients first, only seven of LifeCare’s surviving fifty-two patients were included. Robichaux considered whether those patients might at least be moved by boat. Later, when a boat location near Ochsner Medical Center became relevant, Robichaux asked LifeCare’s corporate office to divert some ambulances from the earlier staging plan to that site. The Shreveport staff also tried to locate ventilator patients who had already been evacuated and arrange transfers to other LifeCare hospitals. Each adjustment depended on transport arrangements that were still being negotiated while the hospital’s options narrowed.

On Wednesday, Dubois spent much of the day trying to find four LifeCare patients who had been flown from Memorial by the Coast Guard early that morning and move them to other LifeCare locations. She had engaged Lone Star Ambulance, a Texas company with which LifeCare had a contract, to collect patients being flown or taken by boat from Memorial and from another LifeCare hospital near the New Orleans airport. That campus was not flooded but had power problems. Dubois sought permission for the ambulances to enter the city but did not receive it. She advised Memorial staff to send patients with whatever transport officials arranged. Late that day she learned that four LifeCare patients and seven LifeCare staff members from Memorial were stranded at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles Streets. She continued calling the Coast Guard and Andress for help, still relying on the contact she believed was connected to federal evacuation efforts.

Narrative Significance

Dubois’s actions do not resolve the institutional failures surrounding LifeCare’s evacuation. Instead, they make those failures visible at the level of work: a patient list transmitted through a chat connection, an uncertain promise of federal help, ambulances awaiting permission, and people stranded at a street corner despite repeated calls. She pursued practical solutions, but she could not make separate organizations share a reliable plan or ensure that a transport offer became an actual rescue.

The book also places her experience within a wider contrast in disaster preparation. Its account of a later hospital system describes a coordinated local command center that offered proactive assistance to its own hospitals and others, unlike the support Tenet and LifeCare headquarters provided during Katrina. Dubois’s isolated effort helps give that comparison human scale: corporate responsibility existed, but in the emergency its resources and authority did not translate into dependable, coordinated evacuation. Her role is therefore not simply that of an executive making calls; it is that of a determined organizer trying to bridge a system whose channels of help repeatedly failed to connect.