Hospital Told to Honor Emergency-Care Pact

A Hawthorne hospital seeking to close its emergency room to patients brought in by paramedics is legally obligated to accept the patients until mid-July, county officials said Friday.

Officials at Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center have asked the state Department of Health Services to allow the hospital to stop taking the patients beginning April 26. The hospital filed the request in mid-March.

However, because the hospital serves as a primary facility--or “base station”--for paramedics, it is under contract with the county to remain open for at least 120 days from the time it filed the request, according to Virginia Price-Hastings, who oversees hospital paramedic programs for the county’s Department of Health Services.

“It is our intent to require them to honor that contract requirement,” Price-Hastings said.

Kennedy officials filed the request after Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood received state permission to stop taking patients brought in by public ambulance as of April 26.

Robert Shaw, the hospital’s president, said that Kennedy attorneys do not believe the facility is under any obligation to stay open past April 26 should the state grant its request.

“We have been advised that the extenuating circumstances that exist give us the ability not to have to honor that contract,” he said.

Since Centinela is the only hospital in the area with an obstetrics unit, Shaw said that Kennedy fears it will face a large increase in obstetric patients that it cannot adequately care for in its emergency room. The time spent with such patients can be five or six times that spent with a normal emergency patient, Shaw and other hospital officials have said.

Kennedy has told county officials that it would continue to treat patients brought in by paramedics providing obstetric patients are excluded.

As a result, talks are under way between the county and Marina Hills Hospital in Ladera Heights to treat obstetric patients when they are turned away from Centinela. Marina Hills has an obstetrics unit, but no emergency room.

“We are in active discussions,” said Carl Williams, director of hospitals for the Department of Health Services. “I would characterize it as going well.”

Marina Hills officials could not be reached for comment.

On Friday, about 50 people attended an early morning meeting at Kennedy. The meeting, billed as a community forum by the hospital, drew a handful of politicians as well as El Segundo and Hawthorne paramedics who transport the majority of their patients to Kennedy.

Hawthorne Fire Chief Roger Milstead told the gathering that out of the more than 4,500 people that the city’s paramedics treated last year, more than 2,000 were transported to Kennedy.

“I think we would be taking a giant . . . step backward,” if Kennedy is closed to paramedics, Milstead said.

Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Carson) criticized Gov. George Deukmejian, asserting that the governor has been unresponsive to hospital funding issues.

“There is a quality-of-life issue here and we better start doing something about it,” Floyd said.

A Deukmejian spokesman in Sacramento responded that the governor is working to solve health care problems in the Los Angeles area. “Nothing Dick Floyd says surprises our office,” the spokesman said.