L.A. County to close leased mental-care unit in Rosemead

Los Angeles County will stop housing psychiatric patients at a mental unit it leases in Rosemead, citing “numerous patient life-safety deficiencies,” and instead will add beds at the Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Campus in Willowbrook.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a $3.57-million expansion of the Augustus F. Hawkins Comprehensive Mental Health Center inpatient unit at King’s Willowbrook campus, south of Watts.

The renovations will add 26 beds to the 41-bed center, replacing the 24 beds at the county-run unit in Rosemead. Twenty-one beds are expected to be ready in September, and the remaining five in September 2011.

The Rosemead unit “is a really old facility,” said Carol Meyer, the health department’s chief network officer, citing cracks in the walls and ceilings. “It’s the types of things that could create hazards for the patients.”

In 2008, Jorge Alarcon, a UCLA graduate and 26-year-old patient at the facility, used a T-shirt to hang himself, sticking the cloth in a crack between a bathroom ceiling and wall, Meyer said.

After the suicide, the county changed its policy so that staffers overseeing a suicidal patient “may not leave the patient unless relieved by another staff member.”

The county will have to pay an early termination fee of about $135,000 to Silver Lake Medical Center, which leases the Rosemead facility to the county.

Steve Popkin, chief executive of Silver Lake Medical Center, said that “if there were any patient safety issues the county had, they haven’t brought it to our attention.”

“We are just a landlord,” Popkin said of the county unit. “They provide staffing and patient care.”

Silver Lake Medical Center, formerly known as City of Angels Medical Center, also operates its own separate 70-bed psychiatric unit in Rosemead.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

ron.lin@latimes.com