Welcome, Long Beach Medical Center : But the Number of County Trauma Patients It Will Be Able to Treat Is Yet to Be Seen

The Orange County trauma system, limping along on three good but overworked legs, should be running a lot more efficiently now that the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center is part of the system.

But precisely how much difference the recent addition of the highly regarded Los Angeles County hospital and its trauma team will make remains to be seen.

When the Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center dropped out of the four-hospital network last December because of the financial strain, the volume of emergency patients at the three remaining trauma centers increased considerably. Long Beach Memorial, which is a top-rated emergency facility, will ease some of that pressure.

More important, its location will speed the time it takes to get injury victims in the north coastal area of Orange County to the emergency room, which should save some lives that otherwise might be lost. That in itself justifies the new affiliation.

But the expected 250 to 300 Orange County trauma patients that the Long Beach center is expected to treat annually are considerably fewer than the 900 or more patients that Fountain Valley had been caring for. Many of those will continue jamming the emergency rooms at UCI Medical Center and Western Medical Center-Santa Ana in the central part of the county, where more of a crisis in emergency care exists than in South County at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center.

To stay solvent, hospitals need a good “patient mix” between the number of insured patients and indigents, who are more costly for hospitals to treat because reimbursements are so low.

Because Los Angeles County has even more indigent patients than Orange County, Memorial should have a better balance of patients. But whether it will treat enough indigents to ease the burden on other trauma centers in Orange County’s network is the unknown factor.

So, as important as Memorial’s addition is to the trauma network, it still leaves untreated the fundamental and chronic problem facing emergency medical care here and in many other places: a shortage of money to adequately support the system.

Federal, state and county government have to face up to their responsibility and provide the health care system with the transfusion of money it needs.

Until they do, too many patients, and the hospitals in the area desperately trying to care for them, will remain at risk.