(Hat tip to Wide Awakes Radio)
The Times-Picayune:
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A doctor and two nurses were arrested overnight in connection with the deaths of patients at a New Orleans hospital in the days following Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana attorney general’s office said Tuesday.“We’re not calling this euthanasia. We’re not calling this mercy killings. This is second-degree murder,” said Kris Wartelle, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Charles C. Foti.
This was at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. (Disclosure: I worked the help desk there for about a year, built a help desk intranet and wrote several software manuals. I met very few of the medical staff and only interacted with them when they had computer problems.)
At least 34 patients died at Memorial during that time, 10 of them patients of the hospital’s owner Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. and 24 patients in a facility run by LifeCare Holdings Inc., a separate company.
When I was at Memorial, LifeCare had their own floor and was kind of a hospital within a hospital. From an IT standpoint, the people I dealt with there were as dumb as a box of rocks. But then people who are computer savvy don’t tend to call the help desk.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be trapped in a hospital in the dark, no power, probably limited information about the patients since so much information is computerized, limited food (the cafeteria was in the basement), water, linens, with sick people begging for help, with sewage problems, and over 100 degree heat and little hope of anybody in authority fixing the situation anytime soon. It took four days to get those people evacuated. I can imagine that in those circumstances, it would be easy to convince yourself that some folks are better off dead. In my air-conditioned office, it’s no problem for me to say that those people were wrong. And I would like to think that had I been at Memorial right after Katrina, I would have thought it was wrong then too.
If they are guilty, as I certainly suspect they are, I’m not saying that I agree with what they did. But I can understand it, and pity them.
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