King Medical Center Physicians Call Reports of Problems Greatly Distorted

Two physicians at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center charged at a press conference Thursday that patient care problems have been greatly distorted and that the county supervisors are to blame for “deliberate under-funding” of the institution.

Dr. Lorenzo Brown, a part-time doctor at King and a member of an ad hoc committee of the Charles R. Drew Medical Society, charged that funding for the medical center today is “at the same level as in 1981.”

This, however, was denied in an interview with Virginia Collins, a division chief in the county’s office of the chief administrator who said her budget analysis has shown all county hospitals, including King, have received “steady increases.”

Brown further charged that King’s trauma patient load in the last 18 months “is greater than the total for the past 12 years.” That was also disputed by county officials.

Virginia Price Hastings, who is in charge of pre-hospital care at the county Department of Health Services, acknowledged in an interview that King has struggled to cope with an increasing trauma load but characterized Brown’s assertion as defying common sense. In fact, she said her records show that King’s trauma load during the first six months of 1989 is down significantly from last year.

State and federal health authorities on Sept. 12 cited the hospital for scores of major patient care deficiencies in the areas of nursing, dietary care, infection control, quality assurance, physical plant and administration. County health officials have acknowledged problems at King and pledged to correct them by Dec. 21 in order to avoid a threatened shut-off of about $60 million in public health-care funding.

The Charles R. Drew Medical Society is a group of physicians who support or work at King. They include Dr. Arthur Fleming, King’s chief of trauma and surgery, who attended the press conference.

Fleming renewed an earlier attack on The Times, circulating again a lengthy critique of cases cited in a series of articles about King published earlier in September.

He charged that the articles presented a “distorted, misleading, misrepresented, exaggerated view when, in actuality, we have struggled valiantly to treat an unusual case mix and an overwhelming number of patients with inadequate resources.”

In the articles, The Times detailed what county supervisors summed up as “poor administration, a lack of highly skilled medical staff and a severe shortage of space, staff and funding to adequately deal with the hospital’s increasing patient load.”

The articles were the result of a months-long investigation that included interviews with dozens of health-care professionals and a review of hundreds of pages of documents on patient care at the hospital. The Times series reported higher death rates at King than at the county’s other acute care hospitals and cited a federal analysis of Medicare death rates that ranked King in the bottom 50 of 5,577 hospitals nationwide.

Complaints about patient care and inadequate resources at King were voiced by numerous doctors and other medical staff at the hospital. Dozens of individual cases of patient care were reviewed, and The Times asked outside medical experts to analyze 12 of them.

But at the Burbank press conference Thursday, Brown called the articles “irresponsible journalism” based on “distorted accounts of specific cases.”

All cases cited by The Times were reviewed by outside medical experts, who concluded that the cases were egregious examples of bad medicine, suggesting serious malfunctioning at King. The Board of Medical Quality Assurance is investigating these cases, which included instances in which patients lingered and died for lack of timely surgery.