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Analysis Of Five Days At Memorial: Life And Death In A Storm-Ravaged Hospital

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Introduction The novel Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink is a gripping recollection of experiences from the effects of the natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina. Ethical dilemmas were presented when dying patients and poor conditions met. Because of Katrina, the floodwaters caused power outages that eliminated the ability to use essential equipment to care for critically ill patients (p. 64). Patients on life support required nurses to manually ambu-bagging them in order to maintain ventilation (p. 125). As a result, patients trapped in the hospital were subject to bedsores, unbearable heat, and other unlivable conditions (p. 118).
One ethical dilemma was that medical staff at Memorial needed to …show more content…

193). Healthcare providers are called to follow beneficence, the duty to promote the wellbeing of others (Essential learning: Law and ethics, 2022). More specifically, they can utilize paternalism, which is the ability to override the patient’s autonomy for their best interest. Some of the healthcare staff thought of following beneficence as using paternalism to heavily sedate the patients to the point of euthanization to prevent them from suffering a slow, painful death. They were using paternalism to decide that euthanization was more in favor of the patient’s best interest as most of the patients receiving sedation were not conscious enough to make the decision for …show more content…

In the case of deciding whether or not to euthanize the patients, I likely would have aligned more with Dr. Bryant King (p. 198). When presented with the idea of alleviating the patients’ suffering via euthanization, he thought that the idea was unnecessary at that time, as they had only been there for a couple days and still had supplies. He did not want to be involved in ending patients’ lives as he believed a doctor’s scope of practice did not involve euthanasia. I agree with his take in that I would try to do everything possible before considering euthanasia. I would not be comfortable knowingly taking somebody’s life, and I also agree in that I think nonmaleficence involves not killing patients

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Fink (2013) spends a great deal of time describing the atmosphere which included the staff members frightened pets housed in a makeshift animal shelter in the medical records department. The National Guard refused to rescue the animals; therefore, staff with pets had to choose to abandon them and be evacuated or stay behind in the hospital. Fink (2013) foreshadowed the euthanasia of patients by describing the administration of lethal medications to staff member’s pets. Fink (2013) discussed the deliberations between health care providers regarding patient prognosis and compassionate care in the face of

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With unnecessary care, they did not provided safety because not all patients were in a safe care. They did not provide effective or efficient care for the fact that they were not organized in how to evacuate all patients, how to handle a dangerous situation like this and nor did they have an effective procedure for everyone in the hospital. Doctors performed an illegal procedure in which caused Life-care patient to die due to fear. Although they tried to evacuate everyone in a timely matter they failed to complete it. That choice that Dr. Pou and her team made was a misunderstanding for many yet failed to achieve patient centered because patients were not consent to the fact that they were getting put to die.

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If this same practice is put into use in the context of physician assisted suicide and euthanasia, a line can be drawn to prevent undesirable consequences stemming from a philosophical

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The article describes the events that happened at Memorial Medical Center during and immediately following Hurricane Katrine in Uptown New Orleans. Once the power was knocked out and running water, the hospital tempter rose to about 100 degrees and resources became limited. As resources became limited Anna Pou was force to result to triage which she was not trained for, therefore her method of triage was questioned. Another doctor, Cook, who was the administrator of Memorial ; his methods of patient care were also questioned. In order to evacuate the hospital in the time frame given to him by the state police, Cook gave Pou instructions on how kill four ICU patients who were obese.

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Mistakes are inevitable. Before Hurricane Katrina most individuals evacuated the areas that were likely to be flooded. Hospitals, including Memorial, were not required to evacuate like everyone else. This meant that over two hundred patients were still in the building and even more staff when Katrina hit. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink explores what happened inside the hospital during the aftermath of the storm and the legal battles that persisted long after the week people were trapped inside the building.

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In many hospital cases a group of people in charge are always trying to make the best decisions for patients. At times decisions are usually the hardest to comprehend when dealing with life or death circumstances. In the book Five Days of Memorial by Sheri Fink, hurricane Katrina hit, doctors and nurses made a triage decision to place people into three different categories depending on their conditions. In category three, patients remaining were DNR ( Do Not Resuscitate) patients, who aren't to be revived, which were the last patients to leave Memorial Hospital. Dr Ewing Cook, a chief medical officer, states in the book of Five Days At Memorial , that they “only had two choices:quicken their deaths or abandon them.”

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" In that type of situation the staff wanted to eliminate more of the problem. If only the disaster plan had been calculated correctly, less lives would have been lost or should I say taken. I appreciate this story. As hard as it is to read and digest, I know malpractice knows no bounds.

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However, this should be a learning experience that hospitals have to be more prepared for situations like this to happen. A number of factors like how the Memorial Medical Center was built was a huge problem, the power sources were vulnerable to the hurricane and were damaged. The wall 's structure of the hospitals was too weak and were able to get destroyed before help arrived. The faculty of the hospital were also in need of preparation on how to deal with the situation. We have to keep this in mind and remember that health care professionals will always have the best interest for us for our health and

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The novel Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink gives an inside view of what happened at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina (2005); a disaster inside of a disaster. The lack of preparedness or ethical decision making is quite disappointing, considering Memorial hospital is located in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is well below sea level, and experiences frequent hurricanes and flooding. Memorial hospital itself had little to no plan for evacuating patients once the storm hit. Without power, many of the patients, especially those who were ventilator dependent, became at risk of death.

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“He’s dead, you can’t save him, there is nothing you can do about it” this sentence haunts medical professionals as doctors are trained to save lives. Perhaps what’s even more haunting is a doctor ending a patient’s life. Samuel Shem’s the House of God sheds light on the issue through its intern, Roy who goes through a rough time after killing a patient. Roy falsely thought he killed the patient to release his suffering, however, that’s not the case as he killed him to make peace with his own death.

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The ethical principle of autonomy provides for respect for the patient’s autonomy to make decisions and choices concerning their life and death. Respecting the patient’s autonomy goes against the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. There also exists the issue of religious beliefs the patient, family, or the caretaker holds, with which the caretaker has to grapple. The caretaker thus faces issues of fidelity to patient welfare by not abandoning the patient or their family, compassionate provision of pain relief methods, and the moral precept to neither hasten death nor prolong life.

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Beneficence the action that protects and prevents harm of others and improves their situation (Pantilat, 2008). By changing the code status of this resident with treatment that is futile can improve the resident’s situation. The health care providers can concentrate on pain control and comfort management verses forcing treatment on the resident that will not improve their situation or relieve their suffering. Giving CPR and breaking her ribs to an actively dying resident could be considered doing physical harm which does not not result in improving the resident’s condition. Fidelity is loyalty, fairness, truthfulness, advocacy, and dedication to our patients.

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Military Nurse’s Dilemma Chi Tiet University of Michigan - Flint Nurses are a group of professionals who faces a variety of ethical dilemmas while working. Therefore, these dilemmas cannot only impact on their personalities but also affect their patients. However, ethical dilemmas are argumentative and difficult to deal with, so there is no “right” or “wrong” answer for them. In a military nurse’s dilemma, a military RN is ordered to force feeding a terrorist prisoner while he is undergoing interrogation, and the prisoner is on a hunger strike protesting. The nurse is torn, but fearing of reprisal if orders are disobeyed, so the nurse is appalled at the over-riding a patient’s wish by force feeding him agains his wish.

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It is believed that once practicing physician-assisted suicides becomes an acceptable concept in society, the next steps will easily be taken toward unethical actions such as involuntary euthanasia. Edmund D. Pellegrino, MD, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Georgetown University claims that our healthcare system is too obsessed with costs and principles of utility. He defies the belief that the slippery slope effect is no more than a prediction, by reminding the outlooks and inclinations of our society. Furthermore, he believes there comes a day that incompetent patients and those in coma won’t be asked for their permission to use euthanasia. The Netherlands is another example of such misuse.

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Operational definitions: Critical care nursing is defined as the field of nursing with an attention on the most extreme care of the unstable or critically ill patients following extensive surgery, injury and/or life-threatening diseases. (Australia 's Future Health Workforce - Nurses, 2014) Implications: The consistency in the reactions to moral distress experience among participants is remarkable and informative to those working in critical care units and for decision makers. Moral distress as defined by Leggett, 2013 is a state of the psychological disequilibrium that, ones experience when they know the right ethical decision to make but they cannot make it due to institutional constraints (Leggett, 2013). Additionally, Weinzimmer, et al, 2014 characterized moral distress as a phenomenon in which a healthcare professional perceives an ethically preferable or morally right course of action to take, yet internal or external constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue that course.

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