Let us get one thing straight at the outset of this conversation: Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor is not the only hospital in Los Angeles County capable of hideous and life-altering screw-ups. Last year a nurse at Cedars Sinai gave Dennis Quaid’s infant twins the wrong medication and nearly killed them. My son and I had an experience at Northridge Medical Center that, for the first time in my life, caused me to really, really want to sue the bejesus out of someone. (It is only because my son sustained no lasting physical harm—no thanks to Northridge—that I did not.)
I’m sure many of you have your own stories.
Yet although MLK-Harbor is a hospital that did much good for a great many people, there was a pattern of mistakes, incompetence and failure that, once discovered, could have and should been fixed. But it wasn’t. After repeated warnings, little changed. Then when the scandals and the horror stories kept coming (my own reporting detailed one of them), the fundamental problems were left intact.
And, although detailed and specific promises were made—and made again—the promised layoffs and the retraining of staff simply never happened.
When finally MLK-Harbor’s ER was forced to shut its doors last August, I badgered County Health officials about some of these issues. The response was not….how to put it?….very satisfying. Here’s the relevant clip from the LA Weekly article I wrote back then.
After years of multipage reports issuing dire warnings — not to mention the board’s expenditure of $18 million in taxpayer funds on consultants — and after scores of broken promises, perhaps residents of Los Angeles County deserve to know why, as of last Friday, MLK still had nurses on its staff who could not mix medicine.
“We were told that Harbor-UCLA would take over management of Martin Luther King,” said state Assembly Member Laura Richardson when it was her turn to address the county supervisors. “And that never happened. Well, why didn’t it happen?”
On Tuesday, the Weekly asked county health department spokesman Mike Wilson those same questions. Why were the majority of MLK staff — who were supposed to receive rigorous off-site retraining — never retrained? Why were a significant percentage of MLK staff — who were supposed to be laid off or transferred — never laid off or transferred? And why, after officials announced that the respected Harbor-UCLA Medical Center was taking the reins of MLK — and even changed the hospital’s tainted name from King-Drew Medical Center to Martin Luther King Jr.–Harbor Hospital — did that transfer of power fail to occur? Who stopped it?
“I don’t know,” an exhausted-sounding Wilson said finally. “[health department’s director, Dr. Bruce] Chernof made all those requests.”
Yet someone chose not to put Chernof’s vital “requests” into practice. It was clear this week that county officials, and some of the most powerful politicians in California, had no idea who prevented the ordered changes, or why.
Now, just short of a year since the ER was forced to shut down, in two separate articles the Los Angeles Times reports that hospital and County health officials still have not managed to break through what has been a pernicious cycle of enabling and codependence (to use the recovery clichés) to remove the hospital’s problem employees. Here’s a clip from the second of two Times’ stories:
Under withering criticism, Los Angeles County health officials acknowledged Tuesday that they had not used a key database intended to track and weed out problem employees from Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital for nearly a year.
John Schunhoff, interim Health Services Department director, told the Board of Supervisors that at least some employees had been fired or disciplined since the hospital closed its inpatient and emergency services in August and sent many of its workers to other county facilities. But since then, top managers have been unable to track the employees’ locations and their subsequent performance and disciplinary status.
Schunhoff also acknowledged that at least one disciplined King-Harbor staffer — found to have fallen asleep while watching a heart monitor in 2005 — has since been promoted. (!!!!!)
“The department was not serious about really doing anything about the problem employees,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.He was joined by his four colleagues in a public chiding of the department after The Times last week reported that seriously disciplined employees continued to work.
“It did not have a sense of urgency about it. . . . I feel burned by it,” Yaroslavsky said.
The supervisors’ statements came after years of broken promises by them to root out the malaise and neglect that figured prominently in federal regulators’ decision last year to pull funding after finding that the hospital failed to meet minimum standards for patient care
There’s more here.
And, by the way, despite Zev’s concerned frowning and finger pointing, I for one am not at all inclined to let the County Board of Supervisors off the hook for this one. Sounding shocked—shocked—when the County Health Department continues not to do what it had already not been doing for years is…..What are the terms I’m looking for…? Oh, yeah. Absurdly disingenuous and inexcusably irresponsible. (And pretty freaking dumb, too.)
Listen people, we need MLK-Harbor to one day, hopefully, open its ER doors again. But to get to that goal someone’s going to have to do the hard work of being the grown up. Soon would be good.
That (your closing wish) can only happen when the hospital is depoliticized, and run as any other hospital, based on strict criteria set up the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAHO) which warned the hospital many times that it would revoke MLK’s acceditation before finally doing so in a number of vital areas. That’s something that happens to very few hospitals, and is a dire warning, like getting a D-, but no one cared.
Apparently attempts to discipline employees were met with sick-outs, union strong-arming, and just plain political grandstanding: including from its Councilwoman, Janice Hahn, who kept harping on how her father had pushed the hospital through following the Watts riots as an act of “social justice.” Maxine Waters and the usual crowd harped on that, too. Yvonne Burke said the same thing, just less shrilly.
Then, when Gloria Molina finally, finally put her foot down, she was accused of being racist and singling out African- American workers and being insensitive to the social justice background, to which she retorted angrily. Zev sided with her, but I agree with you — someone characterized him as someone who sits to the side and watches the train take off, then if it looks like it’s gaining momentum, he jumps onto the caboose and pretends to be steering it. (E.g, also with mass transportation, housing density, etc.)
Well detailed, and well put, WBC!
Down here, behind the Orange Curtin, the county simpy did away with running its own hospitals and set up “Medical Services to the Indigent” which reimburses hospitals for treatment. Works pretty well too and several of my homeless friends have been treated at places like Hoag Hospital in Newport – our Cedars-Sinai.
Celeste, I wonder if your experience could have been explained by overworked and underrested staff.
Antonovich provided stats to show that private providers could run the county clinics for half the cost that the county can, for $100/ indigent patient vs. a whopping $200, but of course the unions and political interests will have none of it. I’d bet that MLK could be twice as efficient under private oversight, as well. (But then, who wants to take on that thankless job, under barrage of the same people who see MLK as a “social justice issue” rather than a simple issue of providing the best healthcare for the money, and are committed to its unions, rather than to the taxpaying public.)