Gods and Monsters — Part Two
How can something like this happen?
The bodies of 45 patients have been found at a flooded-out hospital, a state health official said Monday amid otherwise encouraging signs large and small that New Orleans is climbing back two weeks after it was slammed by Hurricane Katrina.The bodies were found Sunday at 317-bed Memorial Medical Center, which was abandoned more than a week ago after it was surrounded by floodwaters, said Bob Johannesen, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals.
…
Police Chief Eddie Compass declined to answer any questions, including whether police received any calls for assistance from those inside Memorial Medical Center after the hospital was evacuated.“I can’t say nothing,” Compass said, referring questions to a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin who did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Another report suggests that the many if not most of the victims died simply from the 106-degree heat over the course of four days.
I can’t even imagine leaving my dog behind — how can health care professionals leave patients behind?
There is generally, as a principle of basic tort law, no “duty to rescue,” unless you are responsible for creating the need to rescue in the first place, or lead others to believe that rescue is underway.
If I were evacuating New Orleans, or volunteering to help others evacuate, my first thought would probably be, “Don’t worry about the hospitals — of course they’re already taken care of.” But conversely, if I were the chief of staff of a hospital, or the chief of police, or the mayor, my first thought would undoubtedly be “Let’s evacuate the hospitals first — that’s certainly the most pressing need.”
You don’t need to be a disaster specialist to figure that out.
I’m not one for blood lust, but this catastrophe-within-a-catastrophe constitutes 45 cases of criminally negligent homicide.
If there was a single 911 call or other plea for help by the hospital staff to local authorities, then those local authorities proximately responsible must be held criminally accountable. If there was no call for help, then of course the culpability lies with the hospital staff.
Somebody — not Katrina, but human beings — caused the death of these people. And they should go to jail for it.
More thoughts, even more disturbing, from Atlas Blogged.
UPDATE #1: The Louisiana attorney general is investigating the deaths. Meanwhile, in a related story, the owner-operators of a Baton Rouge nursing home have been charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide for failing to exercise reasonable care over their residents. Each count can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison. Exactly as it should be.
UPDATE #2: Kevin, MD has the story of the defenses being proferred by the staff of the Memorial Medical Center –
“To my knowledge — and I’ll go to my grave with this — there was no one there who could have been salvaged [sic!]” and wasn’t, [Dr. John J.] Kokemor said in a phone interview from Gulf Shores, Ala., where he is staying. “Sure, some did die, but they were ‘do not resuscitate’ or in their death throes anyway.”
I doubt a DNR was ever meant to imply “sure, leave me in 100-degree heat for as long as it takes to kill me, while you flee to safety.”
Similar Posts:
- Gods and Monsters — Part One
- On Terri Schiavo
- WHO Finds a Way to Bash American Healthcare
- A Hasty-Stitchy Birthday, Part One
- Chavez May Seize Hospitals
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I had heard that the hospital claims that everyone who was alive was removed from the hosptial. So perhaps these 40 people were already dead BEFORE the storm?
I'm not sure how that would be any better. =/
Well, it wouldn't be better for their loved ones…but it would bear significantly on a claim of negligent homicide. People do die in hospitals all the time. Moreover, the circumstances of the storm could conceivably have caused conditions which exacerbated the odds against those patients, without necessarily representing negligence. (I'm thinking of things like loss of power to climate control and life-support equipment.)
By all means…if they were pateients deliberately abandoned by those who had accepted responsibility for their care, then those responsible should be punished severely. But that is not, at this point, the only conclusion which could reasonably be drawn from the evidence at hand.
Kip, I don't understand your claim here. The hospital's power and water goes out; no rescue comes for days, and several dozen patients die. The rescuers arrive, and the rescue of the hundreds of patients who might still survive is supposed to be delayed so that the dead patients aren't left behind, because it would be just as bad to leave behind a corpse as a living patient?
[Kip replies: Huh? How could you possibly interpret this post as meaning "Evacuate the corpses..."? The idea is that they should have been evacuated before they became corpses.]