Tenet Healthcare Katrina Class Action at Tentative Settlement

March 28th, 2011. By LucyC

Six years later and counting—the mess from Hurricane Katrina drags on. This month, one of America’s largest health care corporations was due to go to court over allegations that it is responsible for deaths and injuries at a hospital in the Big Easy during the hurricane. 

However, in the middle of jury selection last week, Tenet Health/Memorial Medical Center reached a tentative settlement—the details of which will not be disclosed until it has received final court approval. 

The class action lawsuit is brought on behalf of people who were essentially marooned at the Memorial Medical Center during the storm of the century. It alleges that the hospital had insufficient electrical back-up in place to deal with the events, as well as failed plans for patient care and evacuation, which resulted in death and in injuries. The hospital sheltered about 1,800 people during the hurricane. 

Memorial hospital was owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, but has since been sold, along with the company’s other Louisiana hospitals, interestingly. At the time, Tenet reportedly did not have an emergency command system set up to deal with the catastrophe —but instead instigated a plan during the hurricane. While officials at Tenet lobbied to get federal rescuers to help out—and who ultimately did not—the company, realizing it was on its own, spent something like $1 million on buses, airplanes and ambulances as well as security personnel to assist the six hospitals it owned in the area.

But it wasn’t enough. After Katrina had dissipated, the bodies of 45 patients were discovered at Memorial Medical Center—a number far greater than that seen at any other hospital in the area. According to a report by The New York Times, some doctors admitted, after the event, “that they had injected patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.”

Criminal charges have not been laid against the physicians, and only one civil case was brought and dismissed on appeal.

Had the class action gone to court the documents produced could have made for some interesting reading. Among the pounds of paper expected to have been produced in court, are e-mails between hospital staff and Tenet, which have not previously been made public, including, to quote The New York Times piece, this:

“Are you telling us we are on our own and you cannot help?” from Sandra Cordray, a communications manager at Memorial Medical Center. She was reportedly asking officials at the Tenet’s Dallas headquarters for supplies and an airlift. Encouraging.

The crux of the class action appears to be a failure of preparedness—by design—with generators placed in the basement of the hospital —in a flood zone? And a lack of will to make the changes recommended to prevent loss of electrical power, and any subsequent emergency plans required. 

Employees state that even before power was lost at the hospital, its air-conditioning system shut down—something it was allegedly designed to do. According to the Times, “American hospitals are required to maintain emergency power systems, but they do not have to support air-conditioning or heating.” Why not?

Temperatures, as we know from the news reports at the time, rocketed to more than 100 degrees, creating an extremely hostile environment for the critically ill and elderly. Memorial had assumed that its backup power would function for at least three days but it didn’t—it failed in less than two days.

The situation at Memorial during Katarina bears eerie similarities to the nightmare that took place in the Gulf of Mexico last year—the BP oil spill—in its failure to plan appropriately for utter and complete failure—failure of the unimaginable. 

And it begs the questions—just how smoothly do things run on a day-to-day basis? How prepared are these large organizations on which we rely so heavily to serve our best interests? How large is the margin for error?  This is particularly important when it comes to medical care, as we’ve seen with recent cases involving the Veterans Affairs hospitals. Soldiers returning from duty often have to turn to VA hospitals for help with serious health problems. Yet some receive a lower standard of care and are left filing lawsuits alleging veteran medical malpractice.

And then there’s your everyday medical malpractice—not to make light of it—and some rather damning data from the first large study in a decade published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that efforts to make hospitals safer for patients are falling short. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs—medical mistakes—and hospital-acquired infections.

The study reviewed the records of 2,341 patients admitted to 10 North Carolina hospitals and found about 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care. Of those patients, 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable and 2.4 percent of the problems caused or contributed to a patient’s death. Medication errors caused problems in 162 cases.

On reflection, it’s hardly surprising that Tenet doesn’t want to go to court to defend itself over the Katrina disaster. But heads up—Tenet has 49 hospitals in 11 states which reportedly had over half-million admissions in 2010. Its outpatient centers treated nearly four million in that same year. The corporate structure includes more than 400 subsidiaries.

Let’s hope the settlement’s a good one.

Tags: Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, medical malpractice, Memorial Medical Center, Tenet Health

This was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Class Action, Drugs/Medical, Personal Injury . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.