Opinion: King-Harbor: ‘This facility is special’
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King-Harbor hospital is still with us, even without patients. The emergency room closed weeks ago, but hundreds of people are still staffing it. Why?
‘What are they doing,’ County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky asked at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, ‘when they report to work?’
They are taking their annual sexual harassment prevention training, responded health services director Bruce Chernof, or other core training requirements, pending their screening and eventual transfer to county medical centers that actually serve patients.
So when all the training is done, they just come in, punch the clock and hang out?
More Yaroslavsky:
At some point, somebody’s going to feel an entitlement to walk in at 8:30 and not even do anything, because they haven’t done anything for several weeks, and now they’re going to be asked to work. It’s a bad situation.
Why, at the urgent care facility that remains open at King-Harbor, are there about 750 on staff while about half that many work in a similar urgent care, with more patient visits, in Antelope Valley? Chernof said he’d have to check those numbers before commenting. Yaroslavsky wasn’t having it; he apparently detected the by-now familiar dance that for years allowed King to elevate patronage and employee interests over patient care:
My fear is that we are going to get victimized. Come back to the same routine. That this facility is special. This facility is different. This facility needs to have cost-plus. This facility, this facility, this facility. And we’re going to end up rationalizing a bloated organization.