When asked years later what prompted her to take a lead in the effort to build a hospital in St. Tammany Parish, civic activist and healthcare champion Norma Core didn’t have to think twice.
“A friend of mine broke his leg and had to go to New Orleans for care,” Core remembered in a newspaper interview some 40 years later. “It was raining, and on the horrible little road through the marsh, the ambulance wrecked. My friend lay in the rain with his leg in disarray. They got him to New Orleans, but he died soon after from shock.”
It was then that Core made up her mind.
“I decided,” she said, “we must have a hospital.”
It took a while, but St. Tammany indeed got that hospital – including the operating room that might’ve saved her friend’s life.
That OR – and its evolution to the leading-edge operating suites now in service at St. Tammany Health System’s flagship St. Tammany Parish Hospital – gets the spotlight in today’s look back at our history.
Installment No. 8: The evolution of an OR
Today’s artifacts: Then-and-now images of St. Tammany Parish Hospital’s operating rooms.
Why they are significant: A lot has changed over the past 70 years, and that includes medical technology.
When it was first built, St. Tammany Parish Hospital was the answer to the prayers of local residents, who previously had to drive across the lake – and this is before the Causeway was built, remember – to receive acute care.
Decades later, St. Tammany would become the first hospital along the Interstate 12 corridor to be a robotics institution. The innovations have only continued.
Scroll down for a look at our OR evolution, as captured in then-and-now photos – as well as a look into what the future holds.