Groups respond to NPR report hospital euthanized Katrina patients

Raw Story | February 23 2006

Anti-euthanasia groups are responding to National Public Radio reports claiming that New Orleans hospitals gave patients lethal doses of pain killers during Hurricane Katrina.

Rumors of patient euthanasia began to spread soon after Katrina struck, but NPR reporter Carrie Kahn claimed in a February 16 All Things Considered report that the news agency had reviewed unreleased court documents relating to the attorney general's probe of Memorial Medical Center. Memorial was surrounded by water and without power as temperatures shot over 100 degrees in the chaos that followed Katrina.

According to NPR:
The documents reveal chilling details about events at Memorial hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses. The witnesses also heard staff discussing the agonizing decision to end patients' lives.
...

According to court documents reviewed by NPR, a key discussion took place on Thursday, Sept. 1, during an incident-command meeting held on the hospital's emergency ramp. A nurse told LifeCare's pharmacy director that the hospital's seventh-floor LifeCare patients were critical and not expected to be evacuated with the rest of the hospital. According to statements given to an investigator in the attorney general's office, LifeCare's pharmacy director, the director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator say they were told that the evacuation plan for the seventh floor was to "not leave any living patients behind," and that "a lethal dose would be administered," according to their statements in court documents.
NPR reports that attorneys for LifeCare, which leased the hospital's seventh floor, reported these incidents to the attorney general on September 14.

According to eye-witness accounts, LifeCare's pharmacy director said that later that Thursday morning, he found Dr. Anna Pou in the seventh-floor medical-charting room. According to his statement, Pou and two unnamed nurses informed him that it had been decided to administer lethal doses to LifeCare patients. From the court documents, it is not clear where the instruction came from. When asked what medication was to be given, the pharmacy director told the investigator from the AG's office that Pou showed him a big pack of morphine vials. The LifeCare pharmacy director stated that, before evacuating, he saw Pou and the two nurses enter the rooms of remaining LifeCare patients.
Anti-euthanasia group Not Dead Yet issued a statement claiming that, "The only way the staff could evacuate was if they could report there were no more living patients to take care of. This was not about compassion or mercy. It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save themselves." The group adds that Memorial staff "must have been exhausted and scared."

LifeSite.net has also taken an interest in the story, quoting CNN and newspaper accounts of other medical professionals who opted to simply "abandon patients rather than actively kill them."

Thus far, no one has been charged over allegations of euthanasia in Memorial or any other New Orleans hospital in connection with Hurricane Katrina.

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