The Deadly Choices at Memorial written by Sheri Fink on ProPublica was fair but expressed Fink’s judgment of Dr. Anna Pou’s actions.
Fink captured the devastation of Hurricane Katrina hitting Memorial Medical Center in gripping detail. She involved herself in the investigation of the critically ill evacuees as she writes in first person at times. She was able to portray the irony in decisions that seemed small at the time of their making but that resulted in huge tragedies. In writing about this investigation, she coupled positive information with negatives following, making the piece fair but biased.
The nutgraf of the article shows that she felt the actions of the medical administrators increased the number of deaths at Memorial. She paralleled the actions of a “well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses” to the most deaths- 45 bodies- than any other hospital of the same size. Fink wrote about the night after Katrina hit where the 52 LifeCare patients had not been evacuated and the Coast Guard was denied to take more patients for the night because of poor lighting and infrastructure. Before mentioning this, Fink wrote that the doctors were “under stress and sleeping little.” She said a doctor had ordered a patient’s heart monitor to be turned off and was angry when disobeyed. Although understandable, Fink may suggest that the doctors’ emotional states formed their decision making.
Fink goes farther than putting blame on the group of medical administrators and singles out Dr. Pou. She positively listed the laws and procedures Dr. Pou helped enact after the disaster. She even characterized her as “funny” and “sociable.” Fink injected a negative perspective after mentioning those positives. For example, she said that through her own research, she found that “more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients” than was thought. She later said that “the full details of what Pou did, and why, may never be known.” First she said that many professionals wanted to inject patients but then she pinpoints Dr. Pou as the one who made the game-changing decision.
Fink seemed personally involved in the aftermath of this tragedy. She portrayed the horrors of the storm undoubtedly well. It is both easy and saddening to visualize volunteers carrying “patients who relied on ventilators down five flights of stairs in the dark.” Fink used this information in the piece to paint a picture of the absolutely helpless in the hands of administrators who – quoting one of them- stopped treating and went into survival mode.
