[Olabisi Adekoya]

1. Making life-or-death decisions about patients and the policy for limiting ventilators taught Dr. Evans something that the Memorial doctors did not learn. Experts in public policy, bioethics, and disaster medicine developed the guidelines. Setting out rules in advance of a crisis also served as a way to prevent the ragged staff at Memorial Medical Centre after Hurricane Katrina from having to develop criteria for making difficult decisions during a crisis.

How one should decide is still up for debate. How would New York’s hospitals deal with the enormous demand for life-supporting supplies? How are we going to proceed?

2. The changes in disaster preparedness following Hurricane Katrina were that this nonprofit parent company had a highly organized local command center and was providing proactive and robust assistance not only to its own hospitals but also to others in the region; this was very different from the support that Tenet and Lifecare headquarters provided to their hospital at the time of Katrina.

What remained unaddressed was that, similar to the lead-up to Katrina, some staff members claimed they had never considered or prepared for what they would do in the event of a complete loss of power, slower-burning medical issues, vulnerabilities outside of our control, our difficulty coping with uncertainty, how we die, or how we prioritize and divide what is most precious, vital, and limited.

The United States’ federal, state, and municipal health departments failed to make adequate preparations for unforeseen calamities, which is the cause.

The AMA doesn’t have a guideline or policy for medical associates on how to handle circumstances in times of calamity, which is how I feel about them after reading this tale.

3. Maryland’s approach to disaster planning has the advantage that it was the first state to address the issue by creating a framework for making decisions in disaster planning. This framework focuses on people who may have the best chance of surviving their current illness because saving them would be a more effective way to accomplish tasks and draws on the idea that everyone deserves the same right to live through all stages of life.
Many participants believed it was unacceptable for medical professionals to withdraw life-sustaining care, as was called for in many of the pandemic triage plans, in part because doing so would erode trust in the medical system. Others did not like the idea but were resigned to it. Their weakness was that they thought about using age as the primary basis for allocating resources in a disaster when young lives are saved and the senior citizens are cut in half, which would alter society.
According to Fink, triage in a crisis entails determining how best to allocate resources for the benefit of the greater population, whether that be by maximizing the number of lives saved, years of lives saved, quality of life, fairness, social trust, or other variables. Ideas that are held by small groups of medical professionals may not be shared by the greater community.

4. This anecdote had a favorable effect on my attitude towards the AMA, and I started to consider whether and how traditional medical practices could be modified in emergency situations. I also planned to vote on a proposed initiative for state laws that would automatically exempt doctors from liability in disasters unless they committed fraud

5. Yes, I agree that democracy is the power of the people and a form of government that depends on the decisions of the people. We must respect the people and employ them effectively. As he stated, we don’t do a good job of obtaining public wisdom on decisions pertaining to public policy.

6. I described this experience as an eye-opener that educates and equips me to make wise decisions in similar circumstances.
First off, I’d advise that criteria for allocating medical supplies during a disaster should be developed with input from the general population and that patients should always be treated fairly.
Second, I must make decisions that are clear, dependable, reasonable, and accountable.
The moral of the story is that we should always strive to deliver the best care possible given the conditions and that disaster planning should always come first.

The knowledge I gained throughout the course of the novel will be put to good use.

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