HEALTH OFFICIALS DECRY COUNTY’S PROPOSAL FOR CUTBACKS

Los Angeles County emergency room patients, cancer victims, pregnant women, sick children, the mentally ill and many others who depend upon low-cost medical services will be hurt if a series of multimillion-dollar budget cuts are approved by the Board of Supervisors, health officials predicted Tuesday.

In the San Fernando Valley area, Olive View Medical Center and the county’s public health clinics have been targeted for major cutbacks in figures released Tuesday to the board. Health administrators said the reductions would make it more difficult for thousands of patients, most of them poor, to obtain medical treatment.

Officials with the county’s Department of Health Services have proposed closing the public health clinic in Burbank, reducing medical services at the public clinics in Canoga Park, North Hollywood and Glendale, and eliminating family planning services at clinics in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

In a contingency plan, the county has recommended shutting down five other area clinics--Van Nuys, Pacoima, Valencia, Tujunga and Lancaster--if the courts block its first budget-slashing choices.

“I don’t know who would be taking care of the people no one wants to take care of,” said Dr. Dorris Harris, who oversees health clinics in the northern portion of the county. “What it means . . . is that there will be very little health services left.”

Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar would absorb dramatic cuts and a major restructuring that its administrator, Douglas Bagley, predicted would result in the departure of many physicians.

“If these curtailments actually took place, it would be absolutely disastrous for the institution,” Bagley said. “There is great hope the key figures involved at the local and state policy-making levels will find solutions so curtailments of anywhere near this magnitude won’t take place.”

Whether any of the austerity measures will be enacted remains unknown. In what has become a spring tradition, county numbers-crunchers gloomily predict severe financial problems every year after analyzing the governor’s budget. Many of the county’s services, from health care to the courts, are heavily subsidized by state funds. This year, county officials were more pessimistic than usual, but the possibility that the state could receive an additional $600 million in revenue has lessened the panic.

In the worst-case scenario, plans to expand Olive View’s overloaded emergency room would be canceled and, instead, emergency room physicians would be expected to treat 1,023 fewer patients a month, a 20% reduction. It’s a request that Bagley said he doesn’t know how to implement since the hospital has no control over who arrives on its doorstep.

Olive View would eliminate orthopedic and dental services and slash its outpatient services by about 25%. Expansion of the hospital’s psychiatric ward, where patients often sleep on chairs or on the floor, would be halted.

The most far-reaching changes envisioned for Olive View, however, were not contained in the proposed budget cuts. The county hopes to close three of the hospital’s four medical/surgery wards and convert their use to an in-house nursing home and an enlarged obstetrics ward.

The county would save more than $3 million because it receives Medi-Cal reimbursement for new mothers and nursing home patients, but it typically does not for many surgery patients, said Irv Cohen, director of administration and finance for the Department of Health Services. Cohen said the conversion is also needed to handle the increasing number of women delivering babies.

But the medical/surgery beds need to be preserved to handle the crush of emergency room patients that the hospital is treating, Bagley said. Once stabilized, patients requiring further care are transferred to those wards.

“They are exactly the beds that are in greatest demand for dealing with the emergency crisis,” Bagley said.

Without enough beds, the hospital would be forced to transfer large numbers of patients to other county hospitals in Lancaster, Watts, Los Angeles and Torrance.

Bagley said UCLA’s medical school would end its affiliation with the hospital if the medical/surgery wards were eliminated because the practice of good medicine would be difficult to maintain.

L.A. COUNTY is proposing $55.7 million in cuts. Page 1