King/Drew Hospital Solutions Sought at Meeting

Declaring that she was “tired of looking at these headlines” about Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, U.S. Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald summoned a cadre of health officials to Willowbrook on Monday to explain their plans to solve the hospital’s problems.

The result was a 3 1/2-hour session, which was attended by about 120 hospital officials, local residents and others.

One of the most impassioned speeches came from a representative of the federal agency that earlier this month had threatened to withdraw funding from the 233-bed hospital.

“This isn’t any hospital. This is a very special place,” said Jeff Flick, regional administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“By God, you built this hospital out of the ashes,” he told the audience, referring to the hospital’s establishment after the 1965 Watts riots. “And I know you can turn it around and rebuild it!”

Flick’s agency had announced that it would suspend $200 million in federal funding if the hospital did not immediately address widespread problems in administering medicine. Federal inspectors found that hospital workers had repeatedly withheld drugs from patients or had given them the wrong medications or dosages.

Inspectors had previously documented serious errors that contributed to the deaths of five patients.

On Friday, federal officials decided to give the county-run hospital more time to remedy its shortcomings. A team of investigators will return to King/Drew in the coming weeks for a top-to-bottom review of patient care, Flick said.

“We are not out of the woods yet,” said Millender-McDonald (D-Carson), who represents the area. “We cannot let the people of this community down.”

Absent from the proceedings were the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which oversees the hospital.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn chastised the county for what she called a long history of understaffing and under-funding the hospital.

“This hospital has been under a microscope,” she said. “We know that other hospitals do have problems, that other hospitals do have unexplained deaths.”

Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, director of the county’s Department of Health Services, said King/Drew had a great reform plan “on paper.” The challenge, he said, was in carrying it out.

“I welcome [federal inspectors] coming in because I think it’s the only way we can credibly show progress,” Garthwaite said later. “We can say we’re better, but nobody’s going to believe us.”

Other leaders from the health department and Charles Drew University, which has trained doctors at the hospital since it opened in 1972, also testified. Several explained the hierarchies of their departments as the crowd began to shift restlessly.

But the audience fell silent as Lillian Mobley, a longtime South L.A. activist, began speaking.

“If the Department of Health Services gave more oversight to Martin Luther King hospital, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” she said. “Where was the money, when we’ve been begging for it? And all of a sudden, we find experts from all over everywhere to come fix things. Where were they before?”