Judge OKs Patients’ Suit Against County : Health care: Class-action case targets hospital waiting times for the poor. Officials say they’re doing their best.

A Los Angeles judge Friday authorized public-interest lawyers to proceed with a class-action lawsuit aimed at reducing waiting times for low-income patients at county clinics and hospitals.

Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien agreed to certify the patients as a class in the lawsuit filed last year against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Director of Health Services Robert C. Gates.

The suit does not seek financial damages. Instead, it seeks a court order requiring the county to adopt formal standards for medical care--including limits on the time patients must wait for scheduled appointments and emergency treatment.

O’Brien’s decision was procedural, not based on the merits of the case. His ruling means that attorneys will be able go forward on behalf on thousands of low-income patients of the county health care system, not just the handful of individuals whose names appear on the original complaint.

The lawsuit contends that despite a legal obligation to provide medical services for the poor, “interminable delays in delivering essential medical care have become the norm at the county’s facilities.” Without giving names or dates, the lawsuit cited the case of a woman who “died of a ruptured aortic valve after waiting for more than eight hours to be seen in the emergency room” at Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar.

“Meanwhile, a woman with suspected uterine cancer was advised to get a hysterectomy because she would receive the surgery sooner than a biopsy from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center,” said the lawsuit, filed by the Western Center on Law and Poverty and other groups.

“A diabetic with failing eyesight will have to wait more than 200 days for an appointment, during which time he may go blind,” the suit said.

While acknowledging the county’s financial distress, the fiscal crisis “doesn’t mean that indigent persons in Los Angeles County are not to be provided a certain quality of medical care on a timely basis,” said Silvia Argueta, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, one of the groups filing the lawsuit.

County officials have said they are doing the best they can with limited funds and an enormous volume of patients. Moreover, they say, the formal standards the lawsuit seeks are unnecessary.

“We already have standards,” said Patrick Wu, a deputy county counsel handling the defense. “We have a policy where people are assessed individually. . . . We have essentially been triaging or assessing people on an individualized basis for . . . years.”

The county maintains more than 50 clinics, hospitals, and health and rehabilitation centers, providing for nearly 5 million medical visits annually. The system serves tens of thousands of indigent General Relief recipients, as well as hundreds of thousands of Medi-Cal patients.