Archives for August 2009

The Deadly Choices at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina

Sheri Fink, The Deadly Choices at Memorial. This article was a collaboration between The New York Times Magazine, 25 August 2009 and ProPublica, 27 August 2009. [This is] “the story of what happened at a New Orleans hospital cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina…. The experiences of doctors and nurses during Katrina, [Fink] recognized, were emerging at the center of a quiet national debate certain to resonate in the decades ahead: What legal and ethical standards must doctors meet in a disaster such as a pandemic flu or terrorist attack? Who should be saved first? Who decides? To understand the pressures doctors and nurses faced, readers needed to know exactly what it felt like to be trapped in a sweltering hospital in a city that had descended into chaos.” Sheri Fink was one of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Investigative Reporting.

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