Don’t Close the County Hospital : The supervisors should realize that the High Desert facility is crucial to an area underserved by medical, social and mental health services.

If the 350,000 residents of the Antelope Valley ever needed to believe in the power of advocacy and strength in numbers, now is the time.

Last month, L.A. County supervisors announced that they might close down High Desert Hospital in Lancaster to help eliminate a projected $600-million budget deficit. To the number-crunchers in Los Angeles who rarely make the trek up the Antelope Valley Freeway to witness first-hand the abysmal lack of medical, social and mental health services in the valley, closing High Desert Hospital represented nothing more than a $35-million cost savings.

But to the residents of this community, the decision is terrible. The hospital is a significant aspect of the community’s infrastructure. Consider:

* The area is underserved by medical, social and mental health services for the working poor and indigent.

* Closing the hospital would cost 700 jobs and $35 million in payroll and other expenditures.

* Some services offered at High Desert Hospital, such as an AIDS clinic, won’t be replicated elsewhere in the Antelope Valley.

Last year the board discussed the need for a new, 165-bed county hospital in the Antelope Valley. Now it says our medical needs do not require the presence of any county hospital.

At the June 1 supervisors’ meeting, Supervisor Gloria Molina asked health officials to come back with more concrete information on what would happen to the community if the hospital closes. To those of us in the Antelope Valley, the answer is simple, obvious and disturbing.

Children and families will suffer, and some will die because medical care will be inaccessible. Emergency rooms of hospitals, now overloaded, will look like war zones as the insured and the indigent square off for services.

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High Desert Hospital serves a region that covers 50% of Los Angeles County, an area of 350,000 residents perched atop the infamous San Andreas Fault and facing an ever-present threat of earthquakes. Lest we forget, this is the valley that was physically cut off from the rest of Los Angeles County when the January, 1994, earthquake toppled the freeway and made it nearly impossible for commuters to enter or leave the area without assistance of the hurriedly assembled Metrolink service.

Only High Desert Hospital has physicians who see more than 75,000 outpatient and 35,000 inpatient cases a year and treat more than 600 AIDS/HIV residents at the hospital’s AIDS clinic. Many of High Desert’s patients will wait until their medical needs become life threatening before seeking care and then will clog the emergency rooms of other hospitals.

Poor and indigent residents lacking transportation already have difficulty traveling to High Desert Hospital. Imagine their traveling to the nearest county facility, in Sylmar, 60 miles away. For the most part, it will be out of the question.

Only recently, High Desert Hospital in partnership with the local school districts and social service agencies equipped a van to bring medical services to families in outlying Antelope Valley areas. These are families who live in a Third World-type of environment complete with limited sewage facilities, often with no electricity, in housing resembling shacks.

Time and again the Board of Supervisors has offered the Antelope Valley the fiscal crumbs. We are known for obediently doing our best to fashion community services from an inadequate share of the county’s resources.

This time, residents are not so apt to swallow the bitter pill, especially since they believe the Board of Supervisors is thumbing its nose at families and children. Three hundred fifty of us attended the June 1 board meeting in Los Angeles. Now the board is to get budget recommendations Monday from its chief administrative officer and is to make a decision on Wednesday. I expect 1,000 people to attend that meeting. It is no exaggeration to say the well-being of this community depends on the survival of this hospital.