Telling the Full Story of Tenet Hospital’s Ordeal

“Tenet’s Troubles Only Deepen” (Sept. 17) spends the better part of 28 column inches rehashing the woes of Tenet Healthcare over the last three years and permitting analysts and longtime critics to opine on the supposed PR damage to the company in the wake of the recovery of 45 bodies from its Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans by the local coroner, after the hospital was surrounded by water for 4 1/2 days after Hurricane Katrina.

Had you made the effort to report and not rehash, you might have turned up these facts, among others:

1. Dozens of bodies are expected to be recovered from all the downtown New Orleans hospitals stranded after the levees breached. The bodies were recovered from Tenet’s hospital before the others because the company carefully had guarded them for a week and had beseeched the coroner for days to come remove them. We believe many bodies at other hospitals are yet to be removed.

2. The Louisiana medical examiner has publicly praised the people of Memorial for doing “everything right” under incredibly difficult circumstances.

3. Tenet engaged private helicopters, buses, ambulances and private security to evacuate thousands of patients, families and staff from its New Orleans hospitals after local, state and federal authorities could not get it done.

It’s easy for analysts, critics and reporters, safe and dry in their air-conditioned offices, to pontificate. Too bad they were not on the ground to see what really happened.

Harry Anderson

Senior Vice President

Tenet Healthcare Corp.

Dallas