Reference no: EM133410856

Memorial Hospital - New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and the Lawsuit against Memorial and Tenet that settled shortly after the trial began On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm. The windows at New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center shattered. But the facility itself remained functional. The staff exhaled. Wow. "We dodged a bullet," they said. Then the levees broke. Memorial's back-up generators were located at ground level. As floodwaters poured into the streets, the building was plunged into darkness. Life-support systems shut down; temperatures rose; food and medicine dwindled. Gunfire could be heard outside. Tenet, the corporation that owned the hospital, had no evacuation plan. Hospital staff repeatedly sent desperate emails: "WE NEED PATIENTS OUT OF HERE NOW!" "Please can you take patients?" "Is anyone out there?" When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Memorial hospital was left in chaos: stifling, stinking of sewage, without power or running water. Doctors faced a terrible dilemma: which patients should they save first? Memorial Medical Center was situated on one of the low points in the bowl that is New Orleans, three miles southwest of the city's French Quarter and three feet below sea level. The esteemed community hospital sprawled across a neighborhood of double-shotgun houses. Several blocks from a housing project but a short walk to the genteel mansions of Uptown, it served a diverse clientele. Built in 1926 and known for decades as Southern Baptist, the hospital was renamed after being purchased in 1995 by Tenet Healthcare, a Dallas-based commercial chain. As floodwaters poured into the streets, the building was plunged into darkness. Life-support systems shut down; temperatures rose; food and medicine dwindled. Gunfire could be heard outside. Tenet, the corporation that owned the hospital, had no evacuation plan. Maintenance staff at the hospital had warned prior to Katrina that the hospital's electrical system was vulnerable to flooding, a known hazard in the low-lying city. Hospital staff repeatedly sent desperate emails: "WE NEED PATIENTS OUT OF HERE NOW!" "Please can you take patients?" "Is anyone out there?" When the answer finally came, it read: "We have been told getting into the city is not going to happen. Have you contacted the National Guard?" Through the broken windows, the pulse of helicopter rotors and boat propellers set the summer morning air throbbing with the promise of rescue. Floodwaters unleashed by hurricane Katrina had marooned hundreds of people at Memorial hospital, where they had now spent four days. Doctors and nurses milled in the foul-smelling second-floor lobby. Since the storm, they had barely slept, surviving on catnaps and bottled water. Before them lay a dozen or so mostly elderly patients on soiled, sweatsoaked stretchers. Now staff and volunteers hunched over the infirm, dispensing sips of water and fanning them with bits of cardboard. Some staffers became convinced that the most critical patients would not survive. One of these believers was Dr. John Thiele. Thiele had no time to provide what he considered appropriate end-of-life care ... He could not justify hanging a morphine drip and praying it didn't run out ... And so Dr. Thiele assisted another doctor, Anna Pou, and several nurses, doing what they believed was the only ethical thing left. That's when the very first tough ethical decision arose ... which was: Who are you going to save first if you know that you may be hours away from all power going out? They injected the most critically ill patients with lethal doses of morphine and sedative. The bodies of 45 patients were ultimately found at Memorial after the August 2005 storm. Eleven months later, as New Orleans staggered back to life, Dr. Pou and two nurses were arrested and charged with "principal to second-degree murder." The public was largely outraged over the arrests. It was the Tenet Corporation, the government and overall leadership that should have been put on trial. And in 2007, a grand jury agreed. No criminal charges were ever bought and the medical staff said they had done their best under extraordinary conditions. It was suggested that Tenet's corporate negligence bordered on criminal. A jury trial was to determine whether Memorial Hospital and corporate owner Tenet Healthcare should be held accountable for deaths and injuries at a New Orleans hospital marooned by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina. The lawsuit against the hospital and Tenet Healthcare Corporation, alleged that they failed to prepare for and respond sufficiently to a foreseeable disaster. Patients and others who took shelter at Memorial were harmed, the plaintiffs claimed, because emergency plans for evacuation and backup power were inadequate. The lawsuit was settled shortly after the trial commenced: the Class-Action Suit Filed after Katrina Hospital Deaths Settled for $25 Million (by Sheri Fink, Special to ProPublica, July 21, 2011) A New Orleans judge approved the settlement agreement that ended a class-action lawsuit against Tenets. Under the terms of the deal, Tenet Healthcare Corporation and a subsidiary will pay $25 million to patients and visitors trapped at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina. The settlement released the company from any future liability for claims by the class members. The $25 million, minus legal fees, will be divided by a court-appointed administrator according to criteria that have not yet been established. The number of class members is unknown, but there were 187 patients and about 800 visitors in the hospital when the emergency took hold. Tenet reported revenues of more than $9 billion in 2010. In the settlement agreement, Tenet and the hospital, which has since been sold, deny all of the allegations brought against them in the case, as they have previously. Records in the case show that Tenet and hospital officials spent days frantically soliciting assistance for the hospital from FEMA, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, state officials and private ambulance companies. Attorneys for Tenet and Memorial had lined up experts to testify that the city's failed levees, a chaotic government response and the hurricane itself are what created the deadly environment. A commentary on the case published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that health care entities may increasingly face legal action for deficiencies in emergency preparedness. It called for clearer legal standards for hospitals "so health care entities are not compelled to prepare endlessly for every contingency." Some relatives of patients who died at Memorial have opted out of the class-action suit and pursued separate claims against Tenet and other defendants. Survivors of some patients settled a separate action against LifeCare, a long-term acute care hospital that leased space at Memorial; one, whose mother died several days after he personally rescued her from Memorial, disclosed in a deposition receiving a payment of more than $200,000.

The Memorial Hospital and Tenet Corporation - Hurricane Katrina events include many audit (both internal and external), ethical, moral, and social responsibility concerns. In addition, there are possible criminal and white-collar crime concerns. You have been retained by a or key stakeholder(s) to identify, analyze, and report on key risk issues. Identify your stakeholder(s) and prepare an executive summary of no more than 5 pages (double spaced) identifying key concerns and providing important advice.