House crisis care bill moves
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Legislation prompted by New Orleans’ Dr. Anna Pou, a surgeon once accused of murdering patients during Hurricane Katrina, was approved by a House committee Wednesday.
House Bill 838 would allow for a three-member panel to review the health-care services given during an emergency before state or local prosecutors could pursue criminal charges against doctors or nurses for their actions.
However, the state attorney general or local district attorneys would not be required to seek the panel’s opinion for such cases or use the panel’s opinion if it is given.
After the 2005 hurricanes, then-Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti conducted a criminal investigation of patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. Pou and two nurses stayed to work at the hospital while the flooded city was being evacuated.
Foti accused Pou and the nurses of killing patients by overdosing them with a sedative-painkiller mix during the days after Katrina, when the hospital had no power and no way to evacuate.
A grand jury refused to indict Pou. All three women denied the accusations.
Three civil lawsuits against Pou are pending.
Dr. Steven Karch, who specializes in drug-related deaths, told the House Judiciary Committee that he was retained by the attorney general’s office after Katrina to review the cases that were deemed homicides.
Karch said he concluded that there was not enough evidence to take the case to a grand jury and that the mode of death in every case should be declared “undetermined.”
Karch said he was told that he need not give a report on his findings. But other reports that ruled the deaths homicides were later released to the media, he said.
“My existence was never mentioned, nor was my opinion mentioned,” Karch said. “I think, if for no other reason, this bill is needed to protect the attorney general, if nobody else, from being bombarded by outside experts who are testifying beyond their field and giving junk science advice.”
The three-member panel created in HB838 would consist of the coroner in the parish where the medical services were given, a member of the state medical society or nurse’s association, and an expert in disaster medicine.
HB838 originally would have required the panel review before criminal charges could be sought.
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