“I've gotten job offers from North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Chicago,” he said in an interview.
Many physicians like Dr. Michaelis thought they'd practice at a temporary location then come back to New Orleans, “but that's less likely to happen as time goes on,” said internist and infectious disease specialist Michael Hill, M.D.
Telephone service has been spotty in some areas, and it's been difficult for patients to navigate around the New Orleans area and get care, Dr. Hill said. His practice is trying to communicate with patients through newspaper ads and its Internet site, “which has updated where we are.” At press time he was working at his group practice's offices in Covington, located north of Lake Pontchartrain, and in Slidell, La. Two other physicians in the practice are working in the North Shore.
He and Dr. Ellis have been trying to organize a summit with members of Congress to establish a medical health care system within New Orleans. “We want to make sure that organized medicine has a voice” in this effort, he said.
6,000 Physicians Displaced in Gulf Coast Region
A recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill estimates that Hurricane Katrina and flooding in New Orleans may have dislocated up to 5,944 active, patient-care physicians, the largest single displacement of doctors in U.S. history.
It's expected that Hurricane Rita may boost the total to an unknown degree, according to the as-yet-unpublished study.
Approximately 6,000 “physicians doing primarily patient care in the 10 counties and parishes in Louisiana and Mississippi have been directly affected by Katrina flooding,” said the study's author Thomas C. Ricketts III, M.D., deputy director for policy analysis at the university's Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
Data for the analysis were drawn from the American Medical Association's master file of physicians for the month of March and FEMA-posted information, as well as data from the American Association of Medical Colleges, Tulane University and Louisiana State University medical schools, the Texas Board of Medicine, and the state of Louisiana.
In an interview, Dr. Ricketts said most of the calls he's gotten to date have either been from physician recruiters or from practices in various parts of the country, asking for names of physicians who need a job.
Locum tenens or temporary positions have been an option for many of these physicians, according to Phil Miller, a spokesman for Merritt, Hawkins & Associates, a physician search firm based in Irving, Tex.
Staff Care Inc., the locum tenens agency of the Merritt, Hawkins group, has been placing physicians all over the country—in Texas, Oklahoma, the Carolinas, and Florida—Trey Davis, executive vice president for the agency, said in an interview. Hospitals and state licensing boards have facilitated this effort by making some exceptions to normal guidelines to process state licensing and hospital privileges, he said.
“We had a physician who contacted us a couple of days after Katrina hit. He flew his small, private plane to a location in Oklahoma and did a face-to-face interview with a government facility. Within 4 days, we pushed his privileges through, and he was seeing patients in less than a week.”
Not every physician is looking to reestablish a practice or begin a new one, Dr. Ricketts pointed out. Some will decide to retire instead. “We don't know what this is going to mean to health care. We've never had to deal with something like this before.”
Mr. Davis said his agency has been receiving a large number of calls for physicians to extend their contracts in their locum tenens jobs for as long as 6 months.