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    Wednesday, February 22, 2006

    Mercy, Mercy: According to an NPR investigative report, euthanasia did happen in at least one New Orleans hospital during the flood:

    Court documents show a discussion occurred between hospital administrators Sept. 1 regarding what to do with the seventh-floor patients who were in critical condition. A pharmacy director, director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator told an investigator in the state attorney general's office that the evacuation plan for the seventh floor was to "not leave any living patients behind," and that "a lethal dose would be administered," NPR discovered.

    McManus, who has hired an attorney to investigate her mother's death, told NPR, "You know, of course I don't know what God's will is. I don't know when He was calling her home. If He did in fact do it, OK. But if man decided that, I want to know that. My family needs peace of mind about that."


    The patients were in a special unit for the chronically ill at Memorial Medical Center. The unit was run by a private company called Life Care which just leased the space from the hospital. The full NPR report is here.
     

    posted by Sydney on 2/22/2006 08:36:00 AM 1 comments

    1 Comments:

    The bigger issue in the Katrina disaster is the failure of hospital/facility administrators & medical staff to properly make plans for a levee breach and prolonged power failure (which is the gist of the Katrina disaster as far as the hospitals were concerned.) Staff & patients of places like Charity Hospital were simply left to die. Norman McSwain was quoted (after he was evacuated) as saying Charity had made no plans for an evacuation should the facility have proven unusable, and he must have served on many of the major governing committees there. Administrators responsible for putting emergency generators below sea level and for relying on helicopter pads only reachable by boat after a levee breach should pay a high price for their stupidity, such as jail time and being blacklisted from any further responsibility for health care. Euthanasia in Katrina health facilities, if it occurred at all, will be used as a smoke screen to obscure this far more important issue.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:50 PM  

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