Five Days At Memorial Analysis

The novel Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink gives an inside view of what happened at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina (2005); a disaster inside of a disaster. The lack of preparedness or ethical decision making is quite disappointing, considering Memorial hospital is located in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is well below sea level, and experiences frequent hurricanes and flooding. Memorial hospital itself had little to no plan for evacuating patients once the storm hit. Without power, many of the patients, especially those who were ventilator dependent, became at risk of death. With nearly no communication between, or guidance from, the so called “leaders” of the hospital, the decisions made by the staff can be seen as quite flawed. Each ethical principle has been violated in this tragic situation at Memorial. Throughout the novel, the decisions made by Dr. Pou and a few others beg the reader to wonder what they would have done in this awful situation. It is not easy to decide what is the right and wrong decision, when hundreds of lives are at stake. The city of New Orleans knew that the storm was coming. Memorial Hospital chose not to evacuate its patients prior to the storm, in hopes that conditions would not get bad enough that evacuation was required, avoiding it all together. Of course, the levees failed and evacuation became a necessity. Most parts of the city were covered in several feet of water. The bottom floor of Memorial began filling with