When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August of 2005, it wrought destruction on a scale unseen before or since in the United States. More than 1,800 people lost their lives, and damages totaled over $108 billion (Knabb et al., 2011). In the immediate aftermath of the storm, medical workers and local hospitals were overwhelmed with patients and struggled to provide care (Fink, 2009). One of the more publicized situations occurred at Memorial Medical Center. With the hospital's power supply fading, doctors had to make life and death decisions while treating many ill and injured patients without evacuation assistance (Fink, 2009). The story of Memorial Medical Center brought to light questions about who gets care in a crisis, when they receive it, and how this is decided.Memorial Medical Center had developed triage protocols as part of its strategic planning for disaster preparedness. However, the protocols provided little guidance during this crisis, as most of the staff were not adequately familiar with them and a number of situations transpired that the protocols did not even address (Fink, 2009;Sweeney, 2014). Ultimately, decisions were made under the guise of doing "the most good with the limited pool of resources" (Fink, 2009). Put another way, attending doctors' professional opinions determined who got treatment at the expense of another. Some doctors based their decisions on the number of lives that could be saved, while others used the number of years of life that could be saved, thus focusing on the healthiest and youngest patients. Analyses of the decisions made at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Katrina, including the euthanizing of some patients (Fink, 2009;Sweeney, 2014), makes it clear that better planning, training, and communication could have enhanced staff's management of triage and, in turn, possibly saved more lives (Sweeney, 2014).
