Latest Trauma Network Withdrawal Worries Hospitals

The withdrawal of a Pasadena hospital from Los Angeles County’s ailing trauma center network will have no immediate impact on residents of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, local hospital administrators predicted Friday.

But administrators of the remaining trauma centers said they are already losing millions on the special emergency service and are worried that they may not be able to continue, even if patient loads do not increase.

“We’re hanging in there at the present time,” said Sheila Bruce, vice president of patient services at Holy Cross Medical Center in Granada Hills. “But on the other hand, we lost $2 million last year” on the hospital’s trauma center, she said. “We’re watching the situation closely.”

Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena on Friday became the 11th hospital out of the original 23 to withdraw from the county’s trauma network because of financial losses. The facility, which lost $3.7 million last year, will leave the network May 1.

“It’s a crisis,” said David Jakway, vice president of Northridge Hospital Medical Center. “It means the San Gabriel Valley and anyone who visits or works there is not going to have any trauma care. If they start flying the people here, which I don’t think they’ll necessarily do because Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center is closer, we just couldn’t afford it.”

The county’s trauma center network was established in late 1983 to treat people with critical injuries. Unlike emergency rooms, trauma centers are required to have a surgeon and anesthesiologist on the premises and to have a battery of other specialists, such as neurosurgeons and orthopedists, available within 20 minutes.

Four trauma centers remain in the San Fernando Valley and Santa Clarita valleys: Holy Cross in Granada Hills, Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Santa Clarita, Westlake Community Hospital and Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

Westlake and Henry Mayo--unlike Holy Cross and Northridge--are known as rural centers because they provide specialists within 20 minutes of receiving emergency calls, rather than maintaining a full staff 24 hours a day, administrators said.

Residents of the east San Fernando Valley were left without a trauma center last April when St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank pulled out of the system. After that withdrawal, many trauma patients were taken to Holy Cross instead, Bruce said. She said the amount of the increase could not be determined, but the hospital treated 800 trauma patients in the last fiscal year.

Sherry Kleven, coordinator of Northridge Hospital’s trauma center, said that even with closure of the Burbank center, Northridge Hospital’s trauma center caseload dropped from 554 in 1988 to 516 in 1989. But losses have risen anyway, from $300,000 annually when the program began to $1 million in the most recent fiscal year, she said.

Spokeswoman Caroline Korth said Henry Mayo did not expect an increase in patients because of the closure of the Pasadena facility. “We’re too far away,” Korth said.

But hospital administrators agreed that the financially beleaguered trauma system, which relies on scarce government funding for the remaining 12 centers, is in serious trouble.

“If it goes under, more people will die, plain and simple,” Kleven said.

* TRAUMA CENTER CLOSES:Action by Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital opens another hole in emergency care.