SANTA ANA : Emergency Service Plan Implemented

Seven months after two city ambulances were turned away from a local emergency room, the Santa Ana Fire Department on Thursday implemented a plan requiring nearby hospitals to accept any sick or injured patient in their assigned area.

“We’re saying the patient’s best place is probably an emergency room--more so than in the back of an ambulance wandering around the county,” explained Santa Ana paramedic coordinator Eric Widdell.

Administrators at three community hospitals still object strongly to the city’s “catchment plan,” and one on Tuesday threatened legal action to block it. But by Thursday afternoon, they appeared to be cooperating, Fire Chief Allen R. Carter said.

“As far as I know, the (hospital) doors are open and things are working, and I have heard nothing to the contrary,” Carter said.

Added Craig R. Myers, executive director of Coastal Communities Hospital and a leading opponent of the plan: “We do what we’re obligated to do--take care of the patients as they come in the door.”

In a letter to Carter on Tuesday, Myers complained that his hospital still lacked specialists in orthopedics, plastic surgery and opthalmology to handle emergencies. He had considered seeking a temporary restraining order “preventing you from delivering . . . patients to Coastal,” or downgrading Coastal’s emergency license to “urgent care,” a move that would effectively close the hospital to city ambulances, his letter said.

But, Myers’ letter concluded, he had decided to try the city’s plan for the next 60 to 90 days.

On Wednesday, the plan’s other opponent, Bryan Burklow, administrator of both Doctors Hospital of Santa Ana and Santa Ana Hospital Medical Center, also reportedly pledged to participate.

So far some officials from the six other hospitals involved have called the plan fair. They are UC Irvine Medical Center, Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove, St. Joseph Hospital of Orange and Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin.

The dispute concerns the lowest level of emergency service, “basic life support” for people with non-life-threatening injuries or illnesses--a fractured leg, a cut or an abdominal pain of several days--who are brought to a hospital by one of Santa Ana’s emergency medical technicians.

Coastal and Doctors both operate “basic” emergency rooms, meaning an emergency room with a physician on the premises. Santa Ana offers “standby” emergency service, meaning a physician is on call.

But all three hospitals contend they have had difficulty recruiting specialists like orthopedists to work on-call and so cannot handle every case that city ambulances bring.

Their Century City attorney, Carl Weissburg, last week asked Santa Ana officials to let the hospitals provide a daily update on what specialists their emergency rooms have and what kinds of cases the ambulances should bring them--an idea the city has rejected as impractical.