Angry Crowd Defends King Hospital

An incensed and animated crowd of more than 100 people gathered at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts on Wednesday to protest the removal of the hospital’s long-time administrator, William Delgardo, and demand the ouster of the county’s health services chief, Robert Gates.

Gates successfully urged the county supervisors on Tuesday to transfer Delgardo out of King. He acted after federal officials threatened Monday to cut off $60 million in public health care dollars to the hospital unless massive, system-wide patient care deficiencies are corrected by Dec. 21.

Earlier this month the supervisors ordered the county Department of Health Services to investigate the hospital following articles in The Times which, the supervisors said, pointed out “poor administration, a lack of highly skilled medical staff, and a severe shortage of space, staff and funding to adequately deal with the . . . increasing load” at King.

At the hospital press conference, which attracted numerous medical center employees during their lunch hour, speakers charged that Delgardo’s transfer was a direct result of “irresponsibly written . . . erroneous” articles in The Times. They said Delgardo has been made a scapegoat by top county officials, including Gates, who have repeatedly refused to give him the budget he needs to do his job.

Gates was also attacked for allegedly failing to keep an earlier promise to consult with the “black community” before making any changes in leadership at the hospital. As speakers called for his resignation, the crowd chanted, “Gates must go!”

Met With Activists

Gates, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday, has said that he attempted several months ago to move Delgardo to another county hospital, but shelved the plan after meeting with community activists who are Delgardo’s defenders.

At the news conference, Dr. Lewis King, dean of the Charles R. Drew School of Medicine and Science, which is affiliated with King, denounced Delgardo’s transfer and negative publicity about King as a “travesty of justice and perpetuation of racism in our society.”

The news conference was called by Lillian Mobley, a member of the Los Angeles Healthcare Task Force and a member of the community advisory board of the Drew school.

Her written statement declared that the medical center has suffered, “not because of Delgardo’s leadership, but because of the Board of Supervisors’ unwillingness to allocate appropriate funds and resources.”

“The King-Drew Medical Center has been forced to practice military medicine under civilian conditions with an inadequate budget.”

Speaker Mary Henry, also a member of the Drew community advisory board, said, “There’s no reason under the sun for the county to decide abruptly to change the administration of this hospital. I’m not saying the hospital is perfect . . . but it’s our hospital and we want to make it right.”

As for scathing state and federal evaluations of the hospital that were released last week, Henry called them unfair. “The fact that we have ‘Martin Luther King’ in the name of our hospital means that we don’t get a fair evaluation,” she said.

Vannoy Thompson, a private builder who served in 1972 on the Southeast General Hospital Authority that helped build King, asserted that the medical center has been “evaluated differently than the other hospitals.”

State health inspectors released reports last week that faulted the hospital for major breakdowns in six fundamental areas of patient care: nursing, dietary services, infection control, quality assurance, administration and physical plant.

The inspection reports were prompted by a national study released in January that analyzed death rates of elderly Medicare patients nationwide and ranked King among the bottom 50 of 5,577 hospitals surveyed.

But Thompson denounced the inspection reports of King as biased and lambasted The Times for putting black leaders in headlines only when they are accused of making mistakes. In Delgardo’s case, Thompson said, he’s “been doing a good job for 18 years.”

But Thompson did distribute a 14-page report that dealt with stories published in The Times Sept. 3 through Sept. 5. King’s medical director, Dr. James Haughton III, and the chiefs of three medical departments were listed as having helped in the preparation of the report.

Among other things, the report addressed individual cases of patient care that medical experts had reviewed for The Times and which they said raised serious questions about the quality of care provided. The report took issue with the following cases detailed by The Times:

* The case of an 18-year-old girl whose throat was cut during what experts said was a “botched” attempt to open a small airway so that she could breathe. Both jugular veins were cut during surgery, triggering a “massive hemorrhage,” according to a General Surgery and Emergency Medicine Joint Conference report of Dec. 9, 1988. In their response, King officials acknowledged that the jugular veins were severed, but said the bleeding was not substantial and “could be controlled by simply applying finger pressure.”

* The case of a 27-year-old woman with meningitis who needed an immediate operation to relieve swelling of the brain, but who died after lingering for at least five hours without evaluation by a neurosurgeon. Medical experts who reviewed the case for The Times said the patient did not receive timely care. But in their response, King doctors said that waiting to operate was a “reasonable medical judgment” and that her brain death was precipitous and unexpected.

The report also defended King physicians who are engaged in private practice outside the hospital. The Times documented cases in which physicians had failed to properly disclose their outside practices or misrepresented the hours they worked. But the King response stated that doctors with outside practices had disclosed them as directed by county ordinance.

In addition, the report defended several senior emergency department physicians who, The Times documented, were not present in the emergency room when they were supposed be. For example, a doctor who signed a time card claiming to have worked a full day at the hospital on Nov. 18, 1988, was actually present for less than four hours, The Times discovered by observing him that day. The King response, however, stated that he and other doctors cited by The Times were given “the liberty” of working off the premises, being called in only for “extreme emergencies and internal disasters.”