New Tests for Tenet

Bad Press

For Tenet, the coverage by CNN just keeps getting worse.

The cable news giant has, by now, spent months investigating allegations that hospital workers euthanized patients at Tenet's Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It continued to build on that story -- offering increasingly damaging testimony -- in an update this week.

Bryant King, a contract physician who first came forward with the story, painted a troubling picture in that update.

Physician Anna Pou "had a handful of syringes," King told CNN. "That was strange on a lot of levels. Number one, we don't give medications; nurses give medications. We almost never give medications ourselves unless it's something critical. Nobody walks around with a handful of syringes and goes and gives the same thing to each patient. It's not how we do it."

Pou has stopped commenting to CNN and hired an attorney to defend her. Her attorney, Rick Simmons, portrayed the conditions at Memorial as horrific -- and the actions by its physicians as heroic -- but stopped short of denying the mercy killings in a statement supplied to CNN.

Tenet declined to comment on CNN's latest coverage.

Authorities located 45 dead bodies inside Memorial after the hospital was evacuated during hurricane-related floods. Tenet has said that some of the patients perished prior to the hurricane -- and that others were under the care of another company that rents space inside the facility -- but has admitted that roughly a dozen died during the aftermath of the storm. The company has portrayed its workers' actions as heroic, as well, while promising to cooperate with the attorney general's investigation.

But the Tenet Shareholder Committee, a group long critical of company management, sees the potential for more bad publicity ahead.