Aug 14 2007
King-Harbor Loses Federal Funding
GUEST: Erin Aubrey Kaplan, contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times
Last Friday, a federal agency concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. – Harbor Hospital in South Central Los Angeles failed to meet minimum patient-care standards. As a result, King-Harbor will lose $200 million dollars in federal funding that constitutes more than half of its budget. The announcement means that King – Harbor, which serves one the city’s poorest communities, will all but shut down. The emergency room at the hospital closed within hours of the announcement and inpatient care units will be closed in the coming weeks. Protesters descended to the hospital’s front lawn last Saturday before Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters held a two and a half hour news conference during which she called the decision to pull funding an “injustice.” King – Harbor, which was built 35 years ago in the wake of the Watts Riots, had been under federal inspection since January 2004. Federal findings over the past three in a half years concluded that patients were in immediate jeopardy due to unsanitary bronchoscopes and medication administration errors among other things. This past May a 43 year old woman died after waiting in the emergency room lobby for forty-five minutes. Despite such incidents, many members of the community are concerned about the hospital’s closure and how it will affect their ability to access immediate health care in the area
2 Responses to “King-Harbor Loses Federal Funding”
The destruction of KDMC began many years prior to today. I’m a R.N. I worked in the operating room on the 11:00pm-07:00am 1991-1996 I was nurse of the year 1992 from the O.R. The management of County health care, DHS did everything possible to undermine this institution.
When the doctors had a contract to train military surgeons in trauma, the county supervisors, DHS moved the blood bank to the psych building.The reason? They said that the pathology department needed more room for labs and office. This caused many deaths, there was no way for the staff to run from the main building to the psych building to bring units of blood in a timely manner.The staff, who dared to raise a question about such mismanagement were met with retaliation.
The L.A. Times has never been concerned about the deaths prior to time when they wanted to shift from issues of finance to incompetencey. I can understand the concern of Times writers. When Ms Kaplan wrote an article 20 December 2006 Re; mismanagement at Habor UCLA, she was removed from the editoral page.
We hear about how incompetent the staff of the hospital is. Let us look at some of the reasons this might be so. There has been several cascadings. In 1993 there was a wholesale removal of middle management (associate directors of nurses,nurse managers etc.) This was done with incentives of golden hand shakes and threats of demotions for nurses who didn’t take the money.Dr.Erma Tulloch Reed was dismissed.She was head of nursing education. Angela Boatwright MSN was second in command in the nursing education office. She was the only Advanced Cardiac Life Support Instructor at King. She was transfered to County USC against her will. Patricia Daughtry MSN nursing education clinician was harassed, until she was hospitalized and upon recovery left the institution.
I beleive that the closing of this hospital is part of a plan to gentrify Compton and that area of Los Angeles. This can’t be done with an institution dedicated to serving the under served in the middle of that community. There is no county hospital in Brentwood, Beverly Hills,and Bell Aire. There has been a closing of more than 30 county clinics in Central Los Angeles.UCLA has opened a second hospital. I have never heard one word about how they can’t afford to have access to quality health care on that side of town.The only time you will see an eagerness to come to King is in the middle of the night to harvest an organ. You see we should be anxious to serve the majority community all life long,and even in death we should be happy to serve.
I would like to discuss some ideas which I believe could solve most of the problems we are experienceing in aquiring the services we need for our survival.
…Mister Israel, characteristically focussed on elements at King – Drew Medical Center of a fulminating set of problems, generously fails in his remarks to mention personal harassment which as a sort of weapon of attrition was in reference to him and in reference to others who both spoke and who thought outside boxes carefully guarded by a medical variation on an old boys’ network wielded….assaults on character were unrelenting….articulated incentives designed to amplify the quality of care which were articulated by Mister Israel and by others were internal to the institution ignored, were repudiated and/or both….talented employees began long before a recognised crisis arose to talk with their feet….the costs of the exodus of committed and of talented individuals – that is, individuals like Mister Israel – were born institutionally and by patients….let us hope that lessons were productively learned….in peace….