3 Other O.C. Emergency Centers to Handle Overload, Officials Vow

Although Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center may close its trauma center in four months, officials from Orange County’s three remaining centers vowed Wednesday to cope with an overload of patients, stay open and keep the county’s emergency network alive.

Meanwhile, Thomas F. Riley, chairman of the County Board of Supervisors said he will try to reserve some of the $18 million the county should soon receive from the new state tobacco tax to help the trauma centers.

Riley, who helped set up the county’s nationally known trauma network nine years ago, described the closing of one of the four original centers as “a very serious crisis situation” that he wanted to resolve.

“My own sense is that trauma centers should be a high priority in the county’s evaluation” of how to spend the tobacco tax money, he said.

Proposition 99, approved by voters last fall, increased taxes on cigarettes by 25 cents a pack. While much of the money is supposed to be spent on health care for the poor, an Assembly-Senate conference committee was expected to meet in Sacramento today over how to divide it, including how much to allocate to trauma care.

The latest crisis in Orange County health care began late Tuesday, when Fountain Valley officials announced that they would be closing their trauma center Dec. 27 because of a high volume of unreimbursed costs and high malpractice risks. A trauma center, which offers a higher level of care than an emergency room, offers state-of-the-art emergency equipment and medical specialists on call around the clock.

About 47% of Fountain Valley’s 1,000 trauma patients a year have no private health insurance, officials there said. In addition, the hospital had been unable to retain a neurosurgeon--required for a top-level trauma center--and the trauma center had been losing $1 million a year.

Reacting to news of a closure, experts on emergency care predicted Tuesday that Orange County’s other trauma centers would not be able to accept Fountain Valley’s patients and would have to close soon, too.

But on Wednesday, officials from those centers disagreed.

“No, we’re not going to drop out” of the trauma network, said Susan Meister, a spokeswoman for UCI Medical Center, which operates the county’s busiest trauma center, serving 1,200 patients a year.

“And no, we’re not going to build any more facilities” for additional patients, she said. But “we will be going on to paramedic bypass more often,” sending ambulances to other hospitals when UCI is full.

Officials from United Western Medical Center-Santa Ana and Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo also said they would stay open.

“We have no current intention of closing,” even if some of the extra patients cannot pay for their care, said Charles Mack, chief operating officer of United Western Medical, which handles about 1,100 trauma patients a year.

Mission trauma center director Dr. Thomas E. Shaver said his facility, which handles about 700 patients a year, mostly from South County, also said he could handle additional patients. He added that he did not know details but that his trauma center was “not losing money.”

Shaver expressed confidence that another North County hospital “will realize their responsibility” and volunteer to become a trauma center.

Also confident that another hospital would fill the breach was Dr. Thomas H. Bade, medical director of the county’s emergency medical services division.

“I don’t think it’s safe to say all this doom and gloom stuff,” Bade said. “First of all, we got four months to come up with a way to fix it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was possible to plug the hole with a trauma center--hopefully the same one.”

Asked if Fountain Valley would consider remaining in the trauma system if additional compensation were offered, spokeswoman Sheila Holliday said, “We would have to evaluate what the contribution was.”

Also interested in the trauma system’s plight is state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach). Bergeson, who is organizing a new advisory committee on indigent health care in Orange County, said Wednesday that she knows that the three hospitals remaining in the trauma center are already “besieged” with patients.

She said that the problem was complex and that “probably just an infusion (of state money) isn’t really going to solve the problem in the long run. It’s like putting on a Band-Aid when it needs major surgery.”