SOUTHWEST AREA : Medical Center Set to Open in July

The last patient was wheeled out of the old nursing home more than two years ago. The long hallways are empty, the examining rooms bereft of furnishings, the floors gritty with construction dust.

But medical treatment will be available again here under a plan for a new community health center to serve Southwest Los Angeles residents lacking adequate health insurance.

A new group called the Urban HealthCare Project has unveiled its plans for the center, to be located in the former Kaiser Permanente nursing home on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood.

Kaiser Permanente, the state’s largest health maintenance organization, is giving the $4.2-million complex to Urban HealthCare Project, which is run by a nonprofit corporation. The transfer represents the largest building donated by Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, officials said.

The program hopes to serve Medi-Cal patients and those with little or no health insurance, said Dr. Jeffrie Miller, the project’s chief executive officer and director of ambulatory care at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. Miller moved closer to that goal last week when the project acquired the former 149-bed nursing home just east of the Great Western Forum and Inglewood Park Cemetery. The property, which includes three buildings and a parking garage, will be renamed CityCare Center.

The program is expected to start in July with family practice, pediatrics and women’s health care. The second and third phases, scheduled for early 1994, are to include day surgery, chemotherapy, specialty services and an urgent-care center for problems less serious than those requiring care in hospital emergency rooms.

In the program’s first year, organizers hope to enroll about 2,000 people in a managed-care system similar to an HMO. By emphasizing primary care and prevention, they hope to keep people out of the county’s overburdened emergency-room system.

The project, which will also provide services on a traditional fee-for-service basis, will not employ its own doctors but will form alliances with doctors’ groups such as HealthQuest 2000, a newly formed Hawthorne-based network of 150 physicians, including about 75 in the Inglewood area. It will also use doctors affiliated with King/Drew Medical Center.

The project’s target area is bounded by Washington Boulevard on the north, La Cienega on the west and Figueroa Street on the east.