Dr. Ronaldo Funes was a young man then. He was filled with idealism, but also a dose of reality. It was still a time of childhoods that could be pockmarked by disease.
Osteomyelitis ate at the bone. Measles left their mark. Chicken pox was a bane on every kid’s existence.
Funes came to work at Earl K. Long Medical Center as Associate Chief of Pediatrics in 1969, filled with ideas and enthusiasm and eagerness to take care of families.
“Medicine is an art and a science, and you have to combine them both,” he says. “We did that well at Earl K. Long.”
And he only got better—better at tending to patients and better at giving less coordinated doctors just enough space to figure out how they could do the medical dance all on their own.
That’s how doctors were taught in those days.
“After we got them motivated and showed what to do and how to do it, we just stepped back and let them do it,” Funes recalls. “To them, it was an invaluable experience. It was the first time they were released to doing their own thing. In medicine, you learn by doing.”
Funes left Earl K. Long in 1975 to practice medicine on his own. He missed the hands-on part of patient care.
He retired earlier this year.
Earl K. Long, the once-proud LSU community hospital he helped build, died shortly after.
In April, hundreds of medical professionals and support staff who clocked in and cared deeply about the facility that served many of the area’s poor either went to find jobs at other hospitals in the area or stayed home wondering what they would do next.
Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and Woman’s Hospital absorbed Earl K. Long’s education programs.
The patients who waited for hours to be seen for a sore throat, a cold or a broken bone at Earl K. Long will now be in and out in less than two hours, on average, of LSU’s 24/7 urgent care clinic housed near Earl K. Long’s fossil.
“Eighty percent of the emergency room visits at Earl K. Long could have been seen in a less resource-intensive setting than an ER,” ?says Stephanie Manson, vice president of operations at Our Lady of the Lake
The emphasis will move to educating patients and getting them higher-quality care in the doctor’s office, so that they won’t need to go to a hospital at all.
“It’s much more cost-effective, and there is better access,” says Scott Wester, chief executive officer at Our Lady of the Lake.
It’s an improvement.
And yet, there is also loss.
Earl K. Long was more than a hospital to the city of Baton Rouge.
It was a capsule of stories and experiences with deep nerve connections. It was a gothic incubator that birthed several of Baton Rouge’s best doctors.
And it was the only hospital dedicated to serving the community in North Baton Rouge.
Now, that area’s a hospital desert, with a first-rate community urgent care clinic.
The closest emergency rooms are at Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City and Lane Memorial Hospital in Zachary.
“I am very worried that many people in my area won’t have access to care,” Sen. Sharon Broome, D-Baton Rouge, told the press shortly after LSU announced it would close Earl K. Long’s facilities.
Wester counters that Earl K. Long wasn’t seeing a lot of action. The notion that Baton Rouge will be underserved is skewed.
The emergency room at Our Lady of the Lake saw just a 5% increase in traffic after Earl K. Long closed—barely enough to register in the minds of the average Lake patient.
“People didn’t have a realization of the volume of activity at Earl K. Long,” Wester says.
Earl K. Long also wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton.
“The rooms were small and crowded,” recalls Shannon Pusateri, who was once a patient and later worked at Earl K. Long. “There was no such thing as a private room at the Earl.”
Perspective: Earl K. Long had 50 beds. The Lake? 550.
Earl K. Long had 100 ER visits per day. The Lake? 300.
“The size and scope of the Lake exposes medical residents to a different light than they could have had at Earl K. Long,” Wester says.
“While the care wasn’t fundamentally lacking at the Earl, you were treated briefly and not with a lot of feel-good stuff going on,” Pusateri says. “There just wasn’t enough time for that. I was really sad to realize the things indigent people had to go through to get medical care.”
The vision for the public-private partnership between the Lake and LSU is to become another Vanderbilt, Duke or Cedars-Sinai—leaders in medical education that also set a gold standard for medical care.
Hannah Render’s fork hangs in the air above her salad as she contemplates how to describe her daily life working as an operating room nurse at Baton Rouge General-Mid City in the weeks-old post-Earl K. Long era.
It’s not easy for her to say anything, with HIPAA regulations and privacy rules. She’s careful to stay within her bounds. It still sounds like hell—even without divulging any telling details.
“It’s not a glamour job. 95% of the time, it’s not gratifying. People expect you to care for them,” she says. “Then there are those people who make it worthwhile.”
Wester and Manson claim most ER visits are the result of car accidents and falls. Stabbings and shootings make the headlines, but they don’t make up the bulk of the average ER doc’s day.
Render says plenty of gunshot wounds make their way via the ER into her operating rooms.
She trained at Earl K. Long and learned many valuable, almost indescribable, lessons about taking care of patients there.
“As soon as you thought you were amazed by something, the next day, you were like, ‘Oh, my God,'” she says. “Everybody’s got an Earl story.”
The Earl taught Render how to rein in her reactions to terrible circumstances and stories.
You have to push beyond that, she believes. And that was the beauty of Earl K. Long. There, doctors and nurses were given a certain degree of autonomy, room to figure out not only how to do a spinal tap, but also how to talk to the parents of a child getting one.
“You don’t learn about people in books,” Render says.
Residents at Our Lady of the Lake will refine their state-of-the-art techniques on mannequins. They will watch fiber-optically transmitted surgeries in real time on screens.
“It’s like a pilot in an airplane,” Wester says. “They don’t have to practice in the air anymore. They can practice on a simulator.”
Funes, who poured his life into creating a real-life learning lab at Earl K. Long back in the day, struggles with that idea.
“In the interest of safety for the patients and all of that, those are good advances,” he says. “But I think you tend to keep personalized care away. You’re not going to be able to spend time listening to the patient as much as you used to, because of financial pressure and deadlines.”
