The Troubles at King/Drew

A Times investigation finds King/Drew far more dangerous than the public knows. Community pride, timid county leadership stand in the way of a remedy.

For a public hospital, King/Drew is flush. But it spends millions on employees' odd injury claims, lavish doctor pay and workers who don't show up.

A culture of mismangement pervades nursing, orthopedic surgery, residents’ training and the pharmacy. Individual shortcomings often make matters worse.

Fearful of provoking black protests, they shied away from imposing tough remedies on inept administrators. 'We have failed the community,' one board veteran acknowledges.

Alarmed colleagues reported pathologist Dennis Hooper to King/Drew officials, but he stayed on the job. Records detail sloppy work and faulty diagnoses even before he was hired.

County board must give up its control of King/Drew, experts say. Some also suggest rooting out incompetent workers, linking with a different medical school, even closing for a time to regroup.

In the latest blunder at the troubled hospital, nurses give anti-cancer medication to a man with meningitis. Error renews calls for accountability.

The surgical error is the latest in a series of patient-care mistakes that have drawn scrutiny to the county-owned hospital.

The hospital named for Martin Luther King Jr. was supposed to be a realization of the civil rights hero's dream. From the nightmare of the Watts riots would spring one of the best hospitals in America to serve the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles County. Yet as The Times' series published last week made indisputably clear, today that hospital is one of the nation's worst, and the county Board of Supervisors bears full responsibility for the patients who suffered and died there. The supervisors knew just how badly the King/Drew Medical Center was broken but failed for years to do anything about it.