SHERI FINK

While Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the dangers of failing to evacuate hospitals from the path of a storm, Hurricane Gustav demonstrated that moving thousands of sick people has its own risks. Gustav also highlighted a critical vulnerability of American hospitals - an inability to withstand prolonged blackouts.

It remains to be seen the extent to which the critical needs of seniors in low income high rises, people with home medical needs and those with disabilities have been adequately planned for and met during widespread power outages. I fear the answers.

Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody.

There is a tomorrow after a disaster, and it's sometimes hard to remember that in the midst of it.

If you ever face a significant disaster, do your best to keep up the spirits of those around you, act flexibly and creatively to help, try to sort rumors from truth, and remember that the decisions you make will have repercussions after the disaster has passed.

A patient healthy enough to undergo a kidney transplant might someday no longer need dialysis. That would free up a slot for a new patient.

The moral values, ethical codes and laws that guide our choices in normal times are, if anything, even more important to help us navigate the confusing and disorienting time of a disaster.

Be an advocate for your loved ones in the hospital. Ask tough questions of your local hospital and health system about preparedness for the likeliest emergencies, and express your views on how medical resources should be allocated in case they ever fall short.

Having worked in disasters, I have seen that, in those critical first few hours, those first few days - so much ends up riding on you and your neighbor and whoever is around. The official response always comes later, and it always feels like it comes too slow.

There are places in the world that the power goes out in hospitals, and there isn't clean water, and it's horrific.

The journalistic code of ethics governing the broadcasts requires that opposing views be presented, and that journalists' personal opinions or judgments be left out of factual reporting.

When Katrina struck in 2005, roughly 300 deaths were recorded at hospitals, long-term care facilities and in nursing homes, according to a recently published study of death certificates and disaster mortuary team records. Many of them might have been saved if they had been evacuated sooner.

In the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there is widespread access to dialysis, most of it publicly funded. But in many countries, the majority of patients who need dialysis die without it.

The threat from extreme weather events highlights the importance of investing in preparedness.

Before journalism, I had worked doing medical aid work in conflict zones. Then, as a journalist, I had written about hospitals in war zones.

It is human nature to be shortsighted and to lose momentum to make changes once the story is out of the headlines and there aren't financial incentives or political rewards. We owe to ourselves to learn from the past so we can try to do better.

Is the care of the dying man truly robbing care from the poor man? How reliably can we know when someone is in the last ten days of life?

Of course, no matter how hard we try to be objective as reporters, our life experiences and personal circumstances influence our journalism, including the choice of topics we pursue.

Often in life, the most important question we can ask ourselves is: do we really have the problem we think we have?

But we have gone so far in the direction of over treating terminal patients that we've failed to recognize when we're doing more harm than good.

That being said, even if we cannot achieve it, journalism that strives toward objectivity and fairness has an important place in our society. So, too, does being honest and open when presenting our own opinions, as you do so well in your book

Also, and this may sound naïve, but since my early days in journalism, I've felt that getting as close as possible to truth, revealing the reality of a situation in detail, has its own persuasive power. This allows readers to look at the facts and the perspectives presented and draw informed conclusions.

Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster. It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy. We are a short-sighted species.