Where is Ex-Memorial Incident Commander Susan Mulderick Now?

While the hurricane wrecks things and the flood cuts off access to the hospital building, Susan Mulderick, who is the incident commander of Memorial, guides and leads her doctors and nurses to take care of patients and their families.

Susan also starts the evacuation process by calling for help right away. Since Susan is an important part of Memorial, viewers must want to know if the character is based on a real person. Let’s talk about the answer.

Is Susan Mulderick based on the actual commander of the Memorial Incident?

Yes, Susan Mulderick is based on the same-named Memorial Medical Center incident commander at the time (presently known as Ochsner Baptist Medical Center). Susan was in charge of the hospital’s activities during Hurricane Katrina and the days afterward. She was also in charge of the nurses at the hospital at the time. Mulderick was the chairwoman of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness committee for a long time. She was a big part of making Memorial’s emergency plan, which lacked clear instructions for when the power went out or there was a flood.

Mulderick had to care for the people at LifeCare as well as Memorial. According to the show’s source text by Sheri Fink, when Diane Robichaux of LifeCare asked Mulderick about evacuation, he said, “The plan is to not leave any living patients behind.” Mulderick was questioned when investigators were looking into the deaths of several people who were found in the Memorial hospital building. She told the investigator that she had talked to Dr. Anne Pou several times. Pou was later charged with second-degree murder because she gave four LifeCare patients lethal doses of morphine or other drugs, which killed them.

“One of those talks was about me asking her [Pou] if some of these patients could be given something for what I thought was their suffering, anxiety, and pain,” Mulderick told the investigator, according to the source text. When the investigator asked her if she had talked to anyone about killing patients, Mulderick said she hadn’t. Sheri Fink’s book says that the investigator also asked her if she had talked about “palliative care that might lead to their [patients’] deaths” or “something that would ease their pain but might also speed up the dying process.” “My talks with, well, they were about end-of-life care. “Definitely not to speed up a process like that,” she said in response.

Richard Deichmann, who was in charge of Memorial’s medical department at the time, remembers Mulderick’s words from the “five days” in different ways. Deichmann wrote in his book “Code Blue” that Mulderick asked him if it would be “humane” to euthanize the “do-not-resuscitate” patients at the hospital. He said, “There’s no need to euthanize anyone.” Mulderick’s lawyer said that she never talked about putting patients to sleep with Deichmann or anyone else at Memorial during the time in question.

What happened to Susan Mulderick?

After what happened at Memorial after Hurricane Katrina, Susan Mulderick has tried as hard as she can to stay out of the news. Sheri Fink, who wrote the show’s source text, contacted Anna Mulderick for a story that was published in August 2009 and became the basis of the source text. Mulderick turned down the chance to be interviewed in a formal way about the days after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, it seems like she hasn’t changed her mind, and she hasn’t talked in public about her life or what happened at Memorial.

Sources say that Mulderick works in New Orleans, Louisiana, as the Director of Performance Improvement for a health-related foundation. She has also chosen to keep her private life very secret.