American Nurses Association

The American Nurses Association is not directly identified as participating in the events described in the available passages. Those passages do not specify its policies, leadership, or institutional response. They provide a narrower view of nursing as practiced under pressure: nurses care for patients, assert professional judgment during evacuation, and carry the consequences of the crisis afterward. That context illuminates the professional world around the Association, but it does not establish that the Association directed or endorsed any action described here.

Institutional Visibility and Nursing History

The account of Jannie Burgess places a nurse’s career within New Orleans’s history of racial exclusion. Burgess entered nursing to support her children after jobs as a taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician, and worked for thirty-five years in the city’s hospitals and nursing homes. Although she could care for patients at many private hospitals, her light-brown skin meant she could not receive care at them. Born just months after Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, she waited more than four decades before she could be a patient there. The passage supplies this history of nursing and discrimination, but names no role for the American Nurses Association in it.

Nursing Judgment During Evacuation

When Susan Mulderick told a hastily assembled meeting that floodwaters were approaching Memorial, ICU nurse manager Karen Wynn experienced the shift from hospital emergency to military operation. Nearly two hundred patients needed safety; staff discussed moving those most dependent on life support and mechanical aids first, including ICU patients, newborns, high-risk pregnant women, dialysis patients, and two bone marrow transplant patients. The account presents this as an improvised response under urgent conditions, not as implementation of an Association policy.

At the helipad, a nurse who was also an Air Force captain challenged the disorderly handling of helicopter capacity. After a pilot departed to rescue people elsewhere amid an argument with doctors, she told Richard Deichmann that her Air Force training qualified her to run an emergency flight line. Deichmann put her in charge. She cleared doctors and patients from the landing area, directed them to a wind-protection tunnel, and moved people off the rooftops so helicopters could land. The episode shows nursing and operational expertise claiming practical authority in a crisis; the text does not connect that authority to the American Nurses Association.

A separate dispute concerned the destination of the last group of critically ill babies. When a pilot’s flight plan named a hospital west of Baton Rouge rather than the hospital that had agreed to receive Memorial’s neonates, the neonatal ICU nurses resisted sending the babies somewhere whose capacity they could not verify. Deichmann said they could go wherever the pilot was headed. The nursing director answered by saying she would remove the babies from the helicopter unless the pilot found a way to fly to Baton Rouge. Approval came within minutes, and a later message confirmed that the babies had arrived, including one whose oxygen level matched what it had been on high-tech machines. Their intervention was specific to the patients’ safe transfer and is presented as the nurses’ own professional judgment.

Care, Authority, and Accountability

The passages also show how the crisis made responsibility difficult to locate. In an interview, Mulderick said the idea of medicating patients on Thursday came from her and described her intention as providing comfort, for example with Ativan to relax them. Yet prescriptions seized from the pharmacy showed that Ativan and other ordinary comfort medications had already been prescribed for those patients by Anna Pou and other doctors during the disaster. The account thus distinguishes between a nurse administrator’s description of her role and the documented prescribing activity; it does not assign the American Nurses Association a position on the disputed care.

The later investigation widened the question of institutional responsibility without making the Association an investigative participant. Michael Morales, a homicide prosecutor for District Attorney Eddie Jordan, began to grasp the scale of the case after following filings concerning Pou and her attorney’s effort to keep conversations with Tenet’s lawyer private. The account contrasts this with the attorney general’s office, which had not sought to involve Morales in the investigation. This procedural history concerns prosecutors and investigators, not an intervention by the American Nurses Association.

Aftermath and Limits of the Record

The aftermath is recounted through nurses’ persistent personal costs. Gina Isbell slept poorly, had nightmares in which she saw her patients’ faces, and felt guilty about the staff she had selected to work the hurricane and terrible about patients who had died. She had left Memorial by flatboat, physically and mentally drained, and discovered that her home and community in St. Bernard Parish had been lost. Years later she still wore a hurricane-shaped pendant and remained angry that help had come too slowly, while holding to her belief that she and her colleagues had done the best they could. She was willing to serve in another storm if asked, understanding that work as her job and oath.

Wynn, too, described a changed relationship to nursing. Preparing for possible grand jury testimony meant repeatedly revisiting events; after meetings with her protective attorney, she sometimes needed weeks to feel able to move forward. She recognized what she understood as post-traumatic stress in herself and colleagues, and no longer wanted the responsibility of nursing management. She recalled long workweeks and having called Cheri Landry and Lori Budo to tell them they were scheduled for the storm, while saying that the feeling of exhaustion had begun even before Katrina. These accounts document individual nurses’ distress and professional reconsideration; they do not establish an Association response or a collective institutional view.