For Workers, Grim Day Caps Weeks of Worry

They knew what was coming, but it hardly helped.

And although they had just learned they’d lost their livelihoods--thousands of them before “D-day,” as one worker called it, was over--what workers at Los Angeles County’s soon-to-be-closed health clinics wondered most was:

What would become of their patients?

At the Hubert H. Humphrey Comprehensive Health Center in South-Central Los Angeles, the line at the pharmacy window was 18 people long. Half a dozen preschool youngsters toddled around the floor, marking up coloring books while waiting for their turn at a clinic that serves the too-needy and the oft-forgotten. One pediatrician who had received word of his pending layoff--in fact, the clinic’s entire pediatric team was let go--did not want to discuss what he would do. “The people to write about are those little guys out there who won’t have anywhere else to go,” he said, referring to the children playing in the lobby, an ordinary scene on an anything-but-ordinary day at this clinic, slated to close its doors Sept. 29. At High Desert Hospital in Lancaster, a dozen religious leaders--Christians, Jews and Hindus alike--wandered hallways, consoling grieving workers.

At Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, a too-steady parade of patients made it easy for some workers to forget their own woes for a while. “People are devastated; I am devastated,” said Melinda Anderson, the hospital’s administrator. “But even though we’re curtailing, people are still getting sick.”

At the Yvonne B. Burke Health Center in Santa Monica, Joseph Collins, a single father of two who relies on public assistance to pay family bills, said he will have to travel to Inglewood so his daughter Alyssa can get her last round of immunizations. The West Los Angeles resident said he’ll rely on a friend for a ride. “It’s going to be an inconvenience, to say the least,” he said of the health center’s closing, as Alyssa received an immunization against tetanus. “The next closest place is six miles away.”

Patients seemed perplexed at the Ruth Temple Health Center in southwest Los Angeles. Though they were notified weeks ago that they would have to find their health care elsewhere, some patients did not seem to comprehend what the day’s events meant for them. “They’ve got signs up, and we’ve been telling the patients since August, but I don’t think they understand,” said Paulette Frazier, who works at another clinic, but was visiting the Temple clinic Friday. “I had people come yesterday saying they need condoms. I said, ‘Friday will probably be the last day you can get condoms here.’

“They said, ‘Why?’ ”

*

As the anticipated bad news about the largest layoff in Los Angeles County history crept from one clinic to the next, some workers tried to ease the anguish of the day by watching “I Love Lucy” reruns.

Some cued up classical music on their radios.

After a month of wondering if she would be fired, Marlette Rankin, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Temple clinic, kept champagne out in her car to celebrate, whether she lost her job or not.

By day’s end, about 5,200 medical workers had learned of their layoffs and demotions, which will take effect by Oct. 1, in person. Some also were informed via a polite, to-the-point letter such as the one signed by Douglas Bagley, executive director of the University of Southern California Medical Center. The county regretted to tell the workers they no longer had jobs. The explanation: a budget shortfall. And something about a reduction in state funding. And federal funding. And so on.

Good luck, they were told. Wish you well. If they were too upset, they could go home for the day--though the clinics’ thousands of needy patients still had to be served. But workers had to return Monday and remain on the job through Sept. 30, when Friday’s grim news actually takes effect.

Some workers could not--or would not--contain their anger at county leaders. The Board of Supervisors has been blamed for causing the financial crisis that led to the impending shutdown of 28 community clinics and six comprehensive health centers in the nation’s largest county. Some workers also took great offense at the increased security the county posted at some clinics. County officials said they took the measures because they had received threats, including bomb threats.

“Bombs can’t correct what happened here,” said one angry 30-year-veteran nurse at the Hubert Humphrey health center. “Only votes can.”

“If you’ve got a bank account,” asked one man at the Humphrey center who did not want to be identified, but who was described as the resident wit, “how the hell can you go broke and not know about it?

“A lot of the people here are trying to do the right thing,” he said in a more serious tone. “They come to work every day.

“Why is it if they [screw] up, we have to pay?”

*

At the Edward R. Roybal Comprehensive Health Center on the Eastside, in Supervisor Gloria Molina’s district, a frustrated crowd of doctors, nurses and clerical workers chanted as they marched to Molina’s office: “Gloria, Gloria, donde estas? These cuts won’t heal!”

Passing drivers honked their horns in support, while sheriff’s deputies cleared the way.

When Molina arrived about 10 minutes later, she told the crowd that what was happening was beyond her control.

“Believe me,” she said, punctuating each sentence with a tight smile, “it’s disappointing to me, as well. I wish I were the queen of Los Angeles and my decisions were the only ones being made.”

To which Rita Galvan, 44, a cashier and 16-year employee, replied: “You’re going to have people dying on your hands.”

As the day unfolded, the county’s besieged health workers learned what hundreds of thousands of other laid-off Southern California workers have learned in recent years: There is nothing easy about the business of telling people they are no longer needed--especially when everyone knows they are so very needed.

If you got a large envelope, you knew you were out. It contained information on job-hunting, health insurance and the like.

If you were handed a small envelope, the worst you were getting was a transfer or a demotion.

“If you get that big envelope,” one man at the Humphrey center joked with his colleagues, “don’t take it.”

*

As usual, the wait may have been the worst part.

Some employees at the Ruth Temple Health Center were so nervous they couldn’t wait inside the building.

“I just don’t want to be here,” said Rankin, the 34-year-old lab technician who brought champagne. “I’m going to go get my hair done. I can’t handle it here.”

Rankin said that she owned her home and had no children to support. “I have two birds and a Rottweiler. We’ll live.”

Others remained stoic as well. “It really doesn’t matter,” said Hazel Carter, an 18-year veteran of the county and a nursing care specialist at Temple. “I truly believe as a registered nurse I will find other employment. And I trust in God. He has always provided for me. No one place should determine our lives.”

An hour later, Carter embraced a young nurse. Both had tears spilling. The nurse had been given her layoff notice; Carter had been spared. “I’m OK,” said Carter later, wiping away tears. “It’s just the others . . . “

“Oh, well, life goes,” said Raivie Manuel, 26, who lost her job as a nurse at Temple. “I already knew it was coming. Three weeks ago I started sending out applications.” She sent out 20 resumes. She’s gotten three interviews so far. She once thought she had a safe job:

“My mom said, ‘Work for the county, it will always be there,’ ” she said with a sad smile.

Cherena Lee, a 31-year-old licensed vocational nurse who lost her job, figures she may work for an agency that sends out nurses. She is the single parent of a 12-year-old. “I have a lot of support. I’ll get tips on jobs here and there,” she said, though suddenly looking deflated. “I just hope I don’t have to go back and live with my mother.”

*

At the Torrance Health Center, immunization nurse Erica Lavanway, mother of a 5-year-old and an 18-month-old, got word relatively early, a bit of mercy on this seemingly endless day.

“It’s hard to learn you will no longer be employed as of Sept. 30th,” the 21-year-old said minutes after getting her big envelope. “But I anticipated this because I haven’t even been here a year.”

With her one-year anniversary with the county falling on Monday, Lavanway said she saw the handwriting on the wall when officials first announced that layoffs were imminent. Still, she said, the past two weeks at work were “kind of frustrating and nerve-racking” because she had to hide her anxiety from her patients.

“As health care workers we kind of had to grin and bear it because our patients are our first priority,” she said.

Still, she worries about her family’s future once her $900-a-week salary is cut. “It’s going to be hard,” she said. “We’re going to be strapped for a long time.” Come Oct. 1, Lavanway plans to file for state unemployment insurance. “I’ve got to put food on the table and buy diapers somehow,” she said.

Some patients at the Torrance center expressed concern as well.

“What will happen to the employees?” said 50-year-old Cristina Baldemor, herself recently laid off from her job as a substitute preschool instructor. “What’s the government doing about this? What happened to the taxes?”

Baldemor had come to the 63-year-old health center to get the tuberculosis testing she needs to apply for a job at a local department store. When asked what she thought would happen to patients like her once the clinic closes, the Philippine immigrant paused for a moment and said, “It’s going to be chaos.”

“There are a lot of people out there like me who don’t have insurance,” Armando Leon of Hawthorne said. “Where are we going to go?”

Leon and his wife, Laticia, had brought their 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, to the clinic to have her chest X-rayed for tuberculosis, a requirement for enrolling her in preschool.

The 30-year-old hoist installer said he came to the brick-and-clay-tiled facility because the same service at a private hospital would eat up too much of his $320-a-week pay.

He once took Daisy to Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne to get an ear infection treated. It cost him roughly $150.

Terminations at the Torrance center were being given in Room 2286, where clinical nursing director Irene Recendez had the nurses sit down before giving them the news. She tried to do it humanely but had to do it quickly because she had at least 75 nurses to “notice” before heading out to other smaller outlying clinics to do the same.

Looking exhausted and emotionally drained, Recendez said she would not know if she was going to be laid off until the end of the day. “It’s terrible,” she said. “It’s a total nightmare.

“Right now, I’m numb,” she said.

While nurses and doctors at the Canoga Park health center took the news in stride--it provided closure after months of speculation--their patients did not.

“They can’t do this. How can they do this to you?” asked Caroline Greenwood, who brought her two sons in for inoculations.

When someone explained the county’s financial crunch to her, Greenwood said, “We don’t have the use of a car, so I don’t know how we’ll get to Olive View, if that’s where we’ll have to go,” she said. “What happens to people like us who are too poor to go somewhere else?”

Greenwood got the same answer that the clinic’s patients have been getting for a week: No one knows.

*

Throughout the Roybal clinic on the Eastside, there were abundant signs that employees had been preparing for this day for weeks.

As if that could somehow help.

A flyer on the wall advertised a Sept. 1 employee dinner cruise out of Long Beach “to say goodby together.”

Here, those employees who received the layoff notices were expected to work the rest of the day. But at 11:30 a.m., about 60 workers and patients gathered in front of the clinic preparing for the march to Molina’s office, while others agreed to stay behind to care for patients.

Like so many of her peers up and down the county, Obdulia Castro, 37, a laid-off nurse from Roybal, spoke more of the troubles to face her charges than of her own loss.

With a widespread shortage of nurses, Castro said she could easily have made more money at a private hospital. She said she believes finding a new job won’t be hard. “I have a lot of experience. I’ll be all right. But where will my patients go?”

Said Patricia Lopez, 49, an obstetric and gynecology nurse practitioner laid off after 21 years with the county: “This isn’t just a job, it’s a mission. Sure I could go work for an HMO and have a cushier job, but these are the patients I want to serve.”

Times staff writers Duke Helfand, Peter Y. Hong, Stephen Gregory, Jill Leovy, Jocelyn Stewart and Timothy Williams contributed to this story.

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