NEW ORLEANS – Nearly 600 LSU Health New Orleans faculty, staff and students from its schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, allied health professions, graduate studies and public health contributed more than 1,500 hours of community service over four days during its Katrina 10 Service Week.
Their volunteer work benefitted community partners across the metropolitan area including City Park, the St. Bernard Project, Second Harvest, Green Light NOLA, Youth Rebuilding New Orleans, Lafitte Corridor, Habitat for Humanity, the New Orleans Mission, Evacuteer and more.
They honored first responders by sending heartfelt, handmade thank-you posters along with a New Orleans-style lunch cooked at the LSU Health New Orleans School of Dentistry and dental supplies to district stations, and they built the Raise the Root Garden, an 18-bed living classroom on nutrition and health for both LSU Health New Orleans students and community groups.
Their 10 Days for 10 Years Food and Toiletry Drive benefitting The Rebuild Center at St. Joseph Church will wrap up LSU Health New Orleans Katrina 10 service on August 29, 2015.
LSU Health New Orleans’ Katrina 10 service included building homes for the under-served, organizing food donations, serving the homeless, painting and cleaning up urban recreation areas and participating in the effort to educate New Orleanians about the importance of and details for evacuation for future storms.
Commemoration activities also included informing current students and faculty about the role LSU Health New Orleans played during Katrina and in the recovery of New Orleans. LSU Health New Orleans reps said they mounted a massive and rapid response to keep its educational commitment to its students and residents by resuming classes and securing new clinical rotation sites in-state within four weeks, keeping health care services intact and preserving the future of health care in Louisiana. Teaching space included movie theaters and a cow pasture in South Baton Rouge, where a 120-cubicle, state-of-the-art dental teaching clinic was built that also allowed far-flung dental school patients to resume their care.
LSU Health New Orleans pathologists and forensic dentists autopsied and identified hundreds of victims of the flooding, as well as those in caskets washed from graves, providing closure to their survivors.
Meanwhile, LSU Health New Orleans faculty treated patients in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and points between. Afterwards, they established clinical sites, becoming the only civilians ever embedded in a combat support hospital and directing medical care on the US Navy ship, Comfort.
LSU Health requested and supported Carolinas Med One, a mobile hospital set up on the LSU Health New Orleans campus that anchored the increased health care capability necessary for a go-ahead for the first post-K Mardi Gras. Faculty from LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine’s Psychiatry Department lived on the cruise ship housing first responders to take care of them and were also embedded in the St. Bernard school system. The care they provided to students, teachers, administrators and families played a large role in the ability of St. Bernard to open a consolidated school so quickly.
LSU Health New Orleans faculty and staff served on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and worked alongside the federal government in its recovery efforts.
LSU Health New Orleans was among the first to return to New Orleans. Its School of Public Health and School of Graduate Studies resumed classes on the LSU Health New Orleans campus in early January 2006. Its schools of Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health Professions followed. The LSU Health New Orleans School of Dentistry came home in 2007.
