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, according to estimates from a recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It's expected that Hurricane Rita may boost the total to an unknown degree, according to the as-yet-unpublished study.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.
Of the physicians in the Katrina flood-affected areas, which included six Louisiana and four Mississippi counties or parishes, most doctors—2,952—were specialists, with 1,292 in primary care and 272 in ob.gyn. practice.
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. “We're working with physicians who don't have a site of service right now because their clinic's been damaged or underwater, and they don't have any patients.” In the meantime, these physicians still need income, and the locum tenens option offers them financial backing until they return to their practices, although “they're not sure whether they'll have a practice” anymore, he said.
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 hospitals 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 numerous calls for physicians to extend their locum tenens job contracts for as long as 6 months.
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