Reducing the Risk in Emergency Rooms : Crime: Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is installing bulletproof glass between the waiting room and the staff. Other hospitals also are beefing up security in the wake of a shooting at County-USC.

A wall of bulletproof glass is now rising in the crowded emergency room waiting area at Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a stark symbol of the heightened safety concerns at local hospitals.

The glass, which will divide throngs of waiting patients from the front-line nurses who attend them, is intended to shield health care workers from violence. Harbor-UCLA has also beefed up its emergency room security staff and plans to encircle its property with a chain-link fence. The hospital may even require visitors to pass through weapon detectors.

Once seen as safe havens, many area hospitals are now acquiring features of armed camps--a trend that accelerated after an irate patient opened fire Feb. 8 in a County-USC Medical Center emergency room, seriously wounding three doctors.

“We’ve seen such a major rise in the violence against hospital personnel over the past two years that virtually every hospital is reviewing its security procedures,” said David Langness, spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California.

Such efforts, however, are not easy for hospitals, many of which try to minimize the barriers between care-givers and the public. Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, for instance, has been weighing whether to arm its security guards, but so far has been reluctant to do so.

“The role of our security force is not to be a police department. The role is to make sure our patients and employees are safe,” said Peter Bastone, executive vice president at Daniel Freeman. “We’re a hospital. We’re not a military camp. . . . If the public and gangs know that we’re neutral turf, it just sort of defuses the situation.”

Nowhere in the South Bay are hospital safety concerns more evident than at Harbor-UCLA, the 553-bed county hospital just east of Torrance--and site of the area’s busiest emergency room.

The wall being built in the hospital’s emergency department is part of a new enclosure surrounding the three-desk triage area where nurses take information from incoming patients. The area, in a corner of the waiting room, will now only be accessible through a locked door.

Nurses will be able to look out onto the waiting room through a large expanse of bulletproof glass, about 15 feet long and six feet high. Hospital officials say they had long intended to install a wall to protect the privacy of patients’ conversations with the nurses.

In the wake of the shootings, however, a county security official says he recommended that bulletproof walls be installed at Harbor-UCLA and several other county hospitals. A similar triage enclosure--complete with bulletproof glass and locked door--was erected in recent weeks in the County-USC emergency room where the shootings occurred.

“We are recommending (the walls) for most of the hospitals where they have very busy emergency rooms,” said Lt. Patrick Soll of the county office of security management. “It’s about the only way we have of providing the staff with adequate protection and still allow them to have visual contact with what’s going on in the waiting room.”

The union representing many Harbor-UCLA employees says it filed a grievance after the County-USC shooting, calling for improved security measures such as the triage enclosure.

“It’s been a long, hard struggle to get funding to see this stuff done,” said Bob McCloskey, business agent for Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union.

Many experts believe the long waits common at public hospital emergency rooms can create a climate conducive to emotional outbursts and violence. But the large numbers of people seeking care can make those waits inevitable.

The Harbor-UCLA emergency room treated 112,000 people in 1991, many of whom lacked health insurance and waited hours to be treated by a doctor. The waiting room was standing-room-only early Tuesday afternoon, with 60 people sitting in rows of molded plastic chairs and another 18 standing.

One man stood with a towel wrapped around his fingers, which he had accidentally cut with a razor blade while doing household repairs. The man, who asked not to be identified, said later that he waited more than four hours before getting 18 stitches in two fingers.

Harbor-UCLA uses a so-called triage system to divide patients into five categories, based on their medical condition, with the seriously ill getting immediate treatment.

“Our interest is to take care of anybody and everybody--but sometimes, we’re not able to do that as quickly as we’d like to,” said Dr. Philip Henneman, director of the hospital’s adult emergency department.

When the new enclosure is completed, people seeking care will first stop at a window to be interviewed by a nurse. Later, they will be called into the walled triage area, where a nurse will review their condition further.

Emergency workers hope the long waiting time will be shortened with the completion of a new hospital urgent care center where people with less acute problems can be treated. Long-term plans call for building a new Harbor-UCLA emergency department with space to treat more patients and a larger waiting room, Henneman said.

Meanwhile, the county is conducting a review of security in all its hospitals, with recommendations expected to go to the Board of Supervisors in the next few weeks.

Soll, of the county security office, said those recommendations could call for weapons screening at county hospitals, in which the public would be monitored, much as travelers are at airports. Other steps could include improving lighting outside buildings and increasing security patrols.

In non-county hospitals, security has also been tightened since February’s shootings. San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, for instance, has installed new locks on some doors in its emergency area, and Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood offered refresher security training. And in Inglewood, Daniel Freeman Memorial, which already had a walled triage area, has added more guards in its emergency room.

Throughout the South Bay, hospital officials say the shootings at County-USC served as a tragic reminder that hospitals are not immune from urban violence.

“It probably shocks and alarms anyone who has anything to do with a hospital emergency department,” said John M. Wilson, president of San Pedro Peninsula Hospital. “It’s supposed to be a safe place.”