Health Facility Fails Latest Test

Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center failed an inspection by federal regulators this week, moving the beleaguered public hospital closer to losing $200 million in federal funding.

Barring a last-minute change, the Los Angeles County-owned hospital is tentatively slated to lose its federal money on Jan. 19, a county health official wrote in an e-mail late Wednesday to the Board of Supervisors. Without that funding, King/Drew could be forced to close, imperiling the largely low-income African American and Latino population it serves, officials have said.

County health officials said King/Drew would have one more opportunity to prove it has corrected its problems before the Jan. 19 cutoff date.

King/Drew had pledged to make changes earlier this month after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services faulted it for allowing county police officers to use Taser stun guns to subdue psychiatric patients.

Hospital officials said they would minimize the role of police on the teams that responded to psychiatric patients and, ultimately, replace them with trained mental health workers. They also promised to retrain workers on how to handle aggressive psychiatric patients without resorting to stun guns or restraints.

But during an inspection at the hospital Tuesday, reviewers from the Medicare agency found that workers still were unable to follow proper procedures.

The reviewers conducted three mock drills, in which doctors and other staff members were asked how they would respond to aggressive mental patients.

In all three, hospital employees were not able to “clearly describe and demonstrate their roles in managing assaultive patients,” according to the health department’s e-mail.

And that was despite intensive training that occurred within the last two weeks, county health department officials said.

In addition, county police officers came to the drills armed with Taser guns, even though the health department had told regulators that officers would not be armed when they first responded, health officials said. County police patrol county-owned facilities and have a substation at the hospital.

Taser guns fire two darts connected to thin electrical wires, and can hit a target as far away as 21 feet. The darts can deliver up to 50,000 volts of electricity, immobilizing a person and causing him or her to fall down.

Jeff Flick, regional administrator for the Medicare agency, would not discuss specifics about this week’s inspection other than to say that his office has not made a final decision about King/Drew’s status.

County health officials struggled to explain why the staff failed the drills. In a series of articles earlier this month, The Times identified incompetence among staff as a major problem plaguing King/Drew, located in Willowbrook south of Watts.

“It is really unexplainable at this point to me how a professional staff ... can’t follow what really is a fairly simple policy,” said Fred Leaf, the health department’s chief operating officer. “I don’t get it.”

The news comes just days before a team of experts from Navigant Consulting Inc. is expected to deliver a lengthy report outlining the depth of problems at the hospital.

The county Board of Supervisors hired Navigant in October, at a cost of $13.2 million, in order to head off sanctions from the Medicare agency. Navigant has been running day-to-day operations at King/Drew since November.

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he and his colleagues were well aware of the threats facing the hospital. He said he has faith in Navigant to fix King/Drew’s problems.

“We’re moving forward and removing incompetent personnel and replacing them with health professionals who will provide quality care,” Antonovich said, faulting timid health directors for problems in the past.

King/Drew has been threatened with the loss of federal funding two other times this year, once for medication errors and a second time for using Tasers on psychiatric patients.

In both instances, the hospital was able to quickly correct the problem to the satisfaction of government inspectors.

This time has been different, because regulators determined that patients were still in jeopardy despite the changes put in place. It is rare for such funding to be pulled; usually the threat is enough to correct a problem.