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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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