Metairie is built around two hospital systems whose main campuses sit barely three miles apart on opposite edges of the suburb, and knowing which one you are sending to is most of the job. Ochsner Medical Center at 1514 Jefferson Highway holds the river side — a multi-tower campus with its own street grid, patient tower, clinic buildings, the Gayle and Tom Benson Cancer Center and the Brent House hotel where families stay, all sharing a single famous address. East Jefferson General Hospital at 4200 Houma Boulevard in 70006 holds the lake side, ringed by the medical office buildings that locals and drivers both shorten to East Jeff. Tulane Lakeside Hospital sits off the I-10 Service Road in 70001 and is where a large share of Jefferson Parish babies are born, which makes it the new-baby address on this page rather than a get-well one. Ochsner Medical Center - Kenner on West Esplanade Avenue picks up the west end of the parish. Because Metairie is flat, gridded and unincorporated, the drive between any of these and any of our benches is a straight line down Veterans Memorial Boulevard, Airline Drive or Jefferson Highway, with the only real friction being the I-10 and Causeway interchange between four and six in the afternoon.
What hospital delivery actually requires here is specific and small. Put the patient's full admitted name on the order, including the name they were registered under rather than the one you call them, and put the unit or room number in the notes. On a campus the size of Ochsner's, a design with only a last name gets handed to a volunteer desk and waits; with a unit on it, it moves. Second, expect the handoff to be at the unit desk rather than in the room — that is the normal practice on the intensive-care and step-down floors at both Ochsner and East Jeff, and a nurse or clerk carries it the rest of the way. Third, size it down. A bedside tray or a narrow window ledge is the real destination, not a table, so our studios build get-well work compact, in a container that will not tip in a van and does not need topping up. The Benson Cancer Center and the transplant floors ask for arrangements that do not shed pollen and do not carry a strong scent, so say "oncology floor" or "unscented, no pollen" in the notes and the designer swaps the stems before it leaves the cooler. If a patient is on a fluid restriction or the unit does not allow standing water, a small potted green plant is the send that never gets turned away. One more thing worth knowing: visiting windows on the intensive-care floors shift, and a family that has been at the hospital for days is frequently not in the room when a delivery lands. Naming a second recipient in the notes — the spouse staying at Brent House on the Ochsner campus, the daughter waiting downstairs, the nurse who has been the one answering the phone — gives the driver a person to hand it to instead of a closed door and a return trip.