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Alice Craft-Kerney, left, talks with visiting doctor Bill Davis at the Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic New Orleans. The clinic was opened more than a year after Hurricane Katrina struck.
AP photos
Patricia Berryhill, left, shares a laugh with patient Rebecca Jones after her appointment at the Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic in New Orleans. Berryhill turned her home into the clinic after Hurricane Katrina.
NEW ORLEANS — The sign on the gate in front of the pretty blue house announced the good news to a neighborhood that has had little since Hurricane Katrina: “There’s a doctor in the house. Make your appointment NOW!”
Earl Davis paused to take in the words, then headed up the ramp and through the door — destined for his first doctor visit since returning to the city five months earlier. The family practitioner who treated him as a boy, and then saw his own kids, left after the storm and isn’t coming back. Hundreds of other doctors have gone the same route.
Medical centers devastated by floodwaters remain closed, with the number of beds available to the sick cut in half.
Charity Hospital, which for generations provided care to the poor and uninsured, sits like a darkened tomb on a downtown street, plywood blocking the main entryway, window shades twisted and broken.
But the blue house at the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Egania Street is open for business, dispensing free health care to anyone in need.
The Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic is its official name now.
“A medical home,” Patricia Berryhill calls the facility offering primary care.
Before Katrina, this was Berryhill’s own home. The living room where her kids congregated after school serves as a waiting area now, its walls painted a peaceful powder blue. The bedrooms are exam cubicles, the kitchen a file room and office.
Berryhill, a registered nurse, still spends almost every day at 5228 St. Claude, working as medical director of the clinic, lording over it as she once did her household.
Another registered nurse, Alice Craft-Kerney, runs the business side as the clinic’s executive director. She grew up in the Ninth Ward, and rode out Katrina in her brother’s house three blocks away.
In 2005, when Katrina struck, Berryhill was managing the high-risk obstetrics and gynecology unit at University Hospital while Kerney was a supervisor for trauma, surgery and the prison ward at Charity. Berryhill was assigned to the medical team that stayed behind during the storm; Kerney was delegated to another group that was to relieve the first.
Eventually, both wound up evacuated from the city — and they returned to a health care system in shambles. Charity, its basement flooded, was closed. University was shuttered for more than a year, though doctors temporarily offered care from a tent. In some neighborhoods, medical workers took to bicycles in search of patients.
“Pre-Katrina there was an inadequate number of beds,” says Kerney. “Charity Hospital was the safety net that would take all of the medically indigent. With Charity being closed and so many of the private sector hospitals closed, it put a tremendous strain on the health-care system.”
A former medical lab employee, Earl Davis was in a car accident years ago and injured his back and hand. After learning that his family doctor would not return to the city, he began searching for a new primary care physician for himself and his family.
The couple live about a mile east of the clinic, and after passing by on several occasions they decided to drop in.
“They should be commended for what they’re doing,” he says. “It’s definitely needed.”
Today, the clinic is one of several dozen scattered across the city but one of the few offering free care. There are plans for new hospitals, but no one expects a system as extensive as the one pre-Katrina. Folks like Kerney and Berryhill believe neighborhood clinics like theirs will be the future of health care — in New Orleans and, possibly, other American cities.
Kerney and Berryhill are already scouting for a larger site, but staffing has been a problem, as it is for public and private hospitals and the other clinics around town. Their nurse practitioner found a better-paying job. During a recent week, a volunteer doctor from Pennsylvania arrived with his sister, a registered nurse in Maine, to pitch in.
“It’s not perfect,” she adds, and then Kerney interjects: “But we’re doing the best we can.”
“Pre-Katrina there was an inadequate number of beds. Charity Hospital was the safety net that would
take all of the medically indigent. With Charity being closed and so many of the private sector hospitals
closed, it put a tremendous strain on the health-care system.”
Alice Craft-Kerney
Registered nurse