![]() And I think my story raises the question of how we want to hold people accountable for their actions in that wider context. All of this occurred in a context of a much wider failure of government institutions. FINK: There was a lot of outrage when health care workers, of all people, were arrested after Katrina for the failures of Katrina. Coast Guard, in my experience, no one regarded anyone as having behaved in an exemplary fashion during that time.ĭr. They had no confidence that people would be rescued and the crises would be solved. I wonder if that reflects what New Orleanians felt about Katrina, which was that the city felt abandoned. SIEGEL: The New Orleans coroner and the district attorney and finally a grand jury ultimately did not indict. ![]() And that was the situation in which the staff was left on the day that these alleged events took place. And so over time, these patients' conditions worsened. And the health professionals were working on very, very little sleep, very exhausted. They were waiting for evacuation helicopters that didn't come as quickly as people had hoped and expected that they would. There was flooding all around the hospital. And those patients got much sicker in the context - and we're talking here about a horribly hot hospital. A decision was made early on that anybody who had a do not resuscitate order, which, as you know, can sometimes go along with people who are very sick and sometimes people who are - who just have personal preferences, or do not wish to be resuscitated, do not wish to have CPR done on them for a variety of medical or personal reasons.Īnd then there was also a decision that the very sickest patients be evacuated last at a certain point. FINK: Yeah, that is one of the sort of the fateful decisions that was made at Memorial Medical Center. SIEGEL: One thing that's pretty clear from your reporting is that there was a great deal of discussion, if not debate and anguish among the staff as people discussed what they should do for some of the sickest patients in the hospital.ĭr. And my goal was really to try to shed light on what actually happened at the hospital. What is clear in the story of Memorial Medical Center is that at least a dozen and half people appeared to have been injected with morphine or this drug, a quick-acting sedative called Midazolam, and they died with those drugs in their systems. And in her description, that was to treat their pain. But she has acknowledged that she did give medicines to certain patients. Pou has chosen not to talk about exactly what she did, and she cites the fact that there are ongoing lawsuits in that decision. SIEGEL: Is it pretty well established, to your satisfaction or from all that you've learned about this, that she administered morphine and another anesthetic, I guess, to people who were not prescribed morphine, whose problem was not extreme pain?ĭr. And she's spoken to a variety of audiences of health policy planners and hospital directors who are trying to look at these issues. She's out representing her medical society in national efforts to look at how to allocate scarce resources in disasters. And as you write, she has emerged as a speaker on this subject of making emergency decisions in a disaster.ĭr. Anna Pou, who was the doctor who was first accused of euthanizing patients. SIEGEL: One of the central characters in this story is Dr. SHERI FINK (Reporter, ProPublica): Thank you. Her story appears on ProPublica's Web site and is the lead feature in this Sunday's New York Times magazine. Sheri Fink, a staff reporter for the independent investigative group, ProPublica, and an M.D., has been reporting on what happened in those harrowing hours inside the hospital for the last two and half years. There are still several civil suits underway.ĭr. One doctor and two nurses were accused of euthanizing four patients, but a grand jury declined to indict them. More than 30 patients died in the hospital as doctors, nurses and administrators struggled with how to handle the evacuation and get their patients to safety. I'm Melissa Block.Īs New Orleans marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the ferocious storm that devastated the city, we're going to focus today on what happened inside Memorial Medical Center during the crisis. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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