L.A. investigates alleged patient-dumping by Costa Mesa hospital

Los Angeles city prosecutors are investigating a Costa Mesa hospital for allegedly taking a mentally ill man 42 miles to downtown’s skid row and dropping him off at the Union Rescue Mission, officials said.

The man allegedly was dropped by taxi outside the Union Rescue Mission, one of larger downtown facilities providing services to the homeless, after being discharged from the College Hospital in Costa Mesa about 10 days ago. The man, described as possibly schizophrenic and bipolar, was taken to an L.A. area hospital after being tended to by mission staffers, city officials said.

Prosecutors in City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo’s office are conducting a probe into the hospital’s conduct.

“The bottom line is we are investigating this and taking it very seriously,” said Jeff Isaacs, chief of the city attorney’s criminal prosecutions. “It could be another classic case of dumping.”

During the last 2 1/2 years, Delgadillo’s office has filed criminal charges against a hospital, sued several other medical facilities and extracted an extensive settlement from Kaiser hospitals for dumping the homeless patients.

Isaacs said if the hospital did transport the man from Orange County to Los Angeles County, it might have run afoul of a state law that makes it a misdemeanor to dump patients in another county. He said the law, enacted about two years ago, makes it far easier for prosecutors to bring charges in such cases.

Susan Taylor, an attorney for the hospital’s parent corporation, said it is “looking into the matter” but won’t comment further until an internal review is conducted.

The Union Rescue Mission and sidewalk in front of it are among the most frequently used sites for patient dumping. Andy Bales, president of the Union Rescue Mission, said it is disappointing that medical providers continue to dump patients on skid row despite the high-profile lawsuits and prosecutions.

“There are a lot of homeless facilities in all those miles between here and Costa Mesa, and yet again a hospital chose to bring a patient here to skid row,” Bales said. Los Angeles prosecutors have investigated more than 50 alleged dumping cases since 2005.

In 2006, city prosecutors filed false-imprisonment and dependent-care-endangerment charges against Kaiser Permanente – the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization – after Carol Ann Reyes, a 63-year-old patient who was discharged from Kaiser’s Bellflower hospital, was videotaped wandering skid row wearing little more than a hospital gown after a taxi dropped her off.

In order to resolve the charges, Kaiser Permanente agreed to establish new discharge rules, provide more training for employees and allow a former U.S. attorney to monitor its progress.

Last June, prosecutors filed civil complaints against Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Feliz and Methodist Hospital in Arcadia related to four separate incidents of alleged patient dumping. In one highly publicized case, a paraplegic man wearing a colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter near a skid row park in February after being discharged from Hollywood Presbyterian.

Empire Enterprises – whose van driver allegedly ignored pleas from onlookers and left the 54-year-old paraplegic, Gabino Olvera – also was named as a co-conspirator in that lawsuit.

In those lawsuits, Delgadillo utilized a state law concerning unfair business practices. The law has been used to prosecute alleged slumlords and allows a corporation to be sued for unscrupulous behavior.

It is a tactic that Delgadillo’s office first warned it might use in December 2005, when it sent a warning letter to several Southern California hospitals it suspected of patient dumping.

richard.winton@latimes.com