The Deadly Choices at Memorial Essay

After the tragic events at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, 45 dead bodies were found in the hospital, said to be given lethal doses of morphine and sedatives by hospital staff (Fink, 2009). In this situation, the medical personnel had to face decisions and challenges they had never had to face before. With water flooding the area and them being trapped in the hospital they had to make quick decisions about evacuation. This article goes over the life-or-death decisions made that day including giving dying patients lethal doses of sedatives to ease their suffering since the staff decided they could not be evacuated. This would come to be extremely controversial, however the staff deemed their actions necessary, and this would serve as an example of how not having prepared emergency plans or employee training can be for disasters like this. The events not only showed the shortcomings of the hospital, they also showed systemic failures of the local and state governments. In my opinion, the hospital owners and the local government were at fault due to their unpreparedness as well as their negligence for providing emergency planning and training for the hospital staff. 

What disturbed me the most was the decisions of the doctors and nurses to basically kill living  patients, however the thing that was most shocking to me was how unprepared the hospital was for the disaster. I would think that public service facilities would have extensive emergency planning, especially a hospital, but surprisingly, the hospital staff were clueless about what to do, leading to many preventable deaths. The owners of the hospital, Tenet Healthcare, had no emergency evacuation plan, no working backup power system, and no clear communication for emergencies (Fink, 2009). Since the hospital’s generators were in the basement, they were flooded very quickly and shut off, leaving the hospital with no power. Corporations like Tenet that own hospitals should have the health of the patients as their greatest concern, but in this case, it seemed like certain budget cuts were made to save money, which cost dozens of lives. The hospital owners were not the only ones who did not have good emergency planning, the local government’s negligence was even worse. They saw that the hospital was struggling, but they did not attempt to provide relief or guidance in evacuations. This is especially shown when a nurse recalled, “We were completely cut off. We felt like no one was coming for us.”(Fink, 2009) These feelings of the staff inside the hospital showed that there was no communication with the outside world and that the staff had to make decisions on their own. They also had no organized rescue attempts like helicopter evacuations until very late into the events which, in this big of a hurricane, showed a clear failure in the government’s leadership.

Normally, medical professionals are held to very high ethical and legal standards. Even one sign of malpractice can cause a doctor to lose their license, however in this situation, it was extremely difficult to prioritize morality when survival was at stake. Since the hospital staff were under extreme pressure, it is not fair to call their actions cruel or unjust, however their actions still resulted in many people losing their lives. The hospital staff should not be held fully responsible for these actions though. Since the local government failed to provide rescue efforts or guidance in evacuation, the staff were put in a situation where they did not know if they could save every patient and this most likely led to them making the choices they did. This dilemma was probably one of the hardest decisions of the staffs’ lives as shown when Pou, the main nurse in the investigations, said "I want everybody to know that I am not a murderer, I do not believe in euthanasia"(Fink, 2009). Nevertheless, they should be held ethically accountable for killing patients, especially since the ethical standard in the US says, "the death of a patient cannot be the goal of a doctor’s treatment”(Fink, 2009).

Ultimately, I think that the hospital owners and the local government should take the most blame, but the hospital staff should also be held somewhat accountable for their actions. Tenet Healthcare’s decisions to not have emergency planning made the hospital into a death trap when the hurricane hit. In addition to this, the local government’s failure to help the hospital made this death trap impossible to escape leading to the doctors having to make the impossible decision of killing patients. If there had been organized evacuation plans created before the hurricane and Tenet had built the hospital to be more disaster-proof, the events would have unfolded very differently. Also, if the government had provided some support near the beginning of the flooding or if they had communicated with hospital staff on what to do to evacuate effectively, they might have been able to keep all the patients alive and still evacuate everyone.

Although there were many deaths caused by the deaths at Memorial that day, they could have been prevented with better strategies. If I were in this situation, I would try my best to use the technology in the hospital and see if any of the patients or staff know how to create a makeshift radio. I would use this to communicate with the government and try to create a plan of evacuation. If this did not work, I would probably do something similar to what the staff did during the actual event. I think that what the staff did was extremely hard and could be considered murder, however it was the result of no emergency plans being in place. I could find ways to resolve this situation when looking back at it, but truthfully, I would be just like the staff at the time, helpless and trying to find a way to help most people survive when no help was coming. One thing I would definitely do differently, though, is that I would try to save more patients, especially after evacuation efforts started. Like Rodney Scott, a former nurse and one of the patients saved at the hospital said, “If they have vital signs, get ’em out. Let God make that decision.”(Fink, 2009) In conclusion, I think that this event should be a learning experience for any healthcare company as well as any public service facilities in general to always be prepared for the worst, even if it costs more. It is important to provide the best safety for all, because when an emergency comes, lives are at stake, and people’s lives are always more important than money.