page_title: Five Days at Memorial
section_title: Content
hierarchical_section_title: Five Days at Memorial / Content
caption_attribution_description: English: New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: Closed Memorial Medical Center (formerly Southern Baptist Hospital) on Napoleon Avenue. Lower floor was flooded after the storm.
context_page_description: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American journalist Sheri Fink. The book details the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in August 2005, and is an expansion of a Pulitzer Prize-winning article written by Fink and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2009. It describes the events that took place at Memorial Medical Center over five days as thousands of people were trapped in the hospital without power. The triage system put into effect deprioritized critically ill patients for evacuation, and it was later alleged that a number of these patients were euthanized by medical and nursing staff shortly before the entire hospital was evacuated on the fifth day of the crisis. Fink examines the legal and political consequences of the decision to euthanize patients and the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia and health care in disaster scenarios. The book was well received by most critics and won three awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.
context_section_description: The book is divided into two parts. The first part, titled "Deadly Choices", focuses on the events that occurred at Memorial Medical Center over the "five days" referred to in the book's title: August 28 – September 1, 2005. During these five days, Memorial's emergency plans proved inadequate as the hospital lost power and its back-up generators had failed, leaving it without lights, air conditioning, sewer systems and essential medical equipment. Thousands of staff, patients and evacuees were trapped by floodwaters inside the building awaiting evacuation by boat or helicopter. Fink describes the unconventional method of triage adopted by the medical staff, whereby ambulatory patients were prioritized for evacuation and those with "do not resuscitate" orders were placed last in the list. Patient evacuation began on the third day and progressed slowly until the fifth day, when some medical staff decided to hasten the deaths of critically ill patients, believing they would not survive, with lethal injections of morphine. The story is described from the perspective of several participants, pieced together from interviews, emails and phone logs.
  The second part, titled "Reckoning", discusses the legal and political ramifications of Memorial's response to the crisis and especially the decisions to euthanize patients. In total, 45 patients died before the hospital was evacuated and 23 were identified as having concentrations of morphine and other drugs in their tissues. Fink focuses largely on the investigation into the actions of Dr. Anna Pou and two intensive care nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, all three of whom were charged with second-degree murder following allegations that they had administered lethal doses of morphine to some patients. The public's sympathy lay largely with the three accused Memorial staff; the charges against Landry and Budo were eventually dropped, and a grand jury chose not to indict Pou in 2007. Fink discusses the ethical issues surrounding the events at Memorial, as well as those involved in disaster settings and euthanasia in general. A brief epilogue critiques health care protocols in disasters and uses the example of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 to illustrate the lack of change undertaken by hospitals in response to the disaster caused by Katrina and a failure of the US government to enforce standards for "emergency preparedness".
caption: Memorial Medical Center in January 2006, still closed after Hurricane Katrina
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