The nation has squandered the opportunity to learn important disaster-planning lessons from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, says Joe Dawsey, executive director of the Coastal Family Health Center, in a conversation published Aug. 29--the second anniversary of Katrina--on the Health Affairs web site. Katrina virtually destroyed Coastal’s network of nine community health clinics in the Biloxi, Miss., area.
“If Katrina happened tomorrow, I honestly don’t believe we’d be better off,” Dawsey tells Tom Bearden, a correspondent with the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” who has reported extensively on post-Katrina recovery efforts.
Despite the problems that have plagued the Katrina recovery, Dawsey says that he has seen no evidence of efforts by the federal government to apply lessons from Katrina toward more effective planning for the next disaster. Asked by Bearden “Who needs to fix this?” Dawsey answers: “I think the healthcare piece would have to be [the federal Department of Health and Human Services] and [the National Association of Community Health Centers] working with local organizations to provide some national coordination.” Read the abstract.
