Hospital to Stay Accredited, Official Says

Los Angeles County Health Services Director Robert Gates told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that a team of medical investigators from the agency that accredits most of the nation’s hospitals will recommend that Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts retain its accreditation if the hospital can correct serious health care deficiencies.

Officials at the Chicago-based accrediting agency--the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations--would neither confirm nor deny Gates’s statement but stressed that the commission will have no final decision until after the findings are analyzed during the next 60 to 90 days. They would not comment on the findings of their investigators who spot-checked medical care at King during a surprise visit last week.

The surprise visit was spurred by a series of articles in The Times detailing numerous problems in patient care and administration at the hospital and by a state health deparment report that accused King of massive health code violations, said Pam Schumacher, a spokeswoman for the commission.

Gates said he got his information from an aide who attended a conference with the accrediting investigators after they concluded their visit at King last week.

Last month, federal health care officials threatened to shut off $60 million in public health care funds to the 430-bed, county-operated hospital if scores of patient care deficiencies are not corrected by Dec. 21.

Pledge to Correct Problems

Gates has pledged to correct all the problems at King. At his urging, the supervisors have removed King’s administrator, William Delgardo, and two of his top aides from their posts at the hospital.

Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) appeared before the supervisors Tuesday to denounce Delgardo’s transfer and praise him for serving King “with honor and distinction.”

She said his abrupt transfer created the unfair impression that he was leaving the the hospital “under a cloud.” The real issue at King, Waters added, is “under-funding and inadequate appropriations from the Department of Health Services.”

During the last four years, she said, King officials have requested $54,494,588 that has not been met by health officials. About 400 posts are vacant at King for lack of money, Waters said.

Gates said he does not know how Waters arrived at the $54-million figure and stressed that county officials have not treated King’s funding requests differently from other county hospitals.

“Over the last seven or eight years,” Gates said, “King has fared about the same as the county’s other acute hospitals.”

Waters also took aim at articles published about King in The Times early last month.

She read into the official record a Sept. 30 letter from Dr. James Macho, assistant professor of surgery at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, to Dr. Arthur Fleming, chief of surgery at King.

In the letter, Macho contended that The Times should not have included him in an article published Sept. 3 that discussed several specific cases of questionable patient care at King. He was not quoted in the story, but he was listed as one of four distinguished physicians outside Los Angeles County who had reviewed cases for The Times at no charge.

At The Times’ request, Macho earlier this year reviewed the records of one surgery at King, then discussed the case in a lengthy telephone interview. He said he would want additional records to reach a definitive conclusion on the case and asked that most of his comments not be published. The Times agreed. However, Macho did agree to publication of his concluding remarks on the case, which expressed concern for the standard of care in the case.

These remarks were not included in the story for reasons of length. Macho now denies that he agreed to be quoted at all.