Defending a Beleaguered Hospital

Killer King.

The malicious moniker cuts deeply for the employees of Martin Luther King Jr. / Drew Medical Center, where any day of the week an immigrant’s child is born into hope and another mother’s child is brought back from the edge of death.

Beset by allegations ranging from padded overtime to transfusing HIV-tainted blood, the proud institution near Watts finds itself under the critical scrutiny of county supervisors, who voted this week to reorganize and reexamine the massive, publicly funded medical center.

Yet workers say it is looking like the same story, different year: MLK is an easy target in a downtrodden neighborhood. No one talks about the positive. First they want to lay us off, now they want to scapegoat us.

Patients, many of whom turn to King/Drew as their only recourse for care, shrug off the controversy. “My son’s still breathing,” sighed one woman resting on a bench outside the hospital, where her son was taken after a New Year’s Eve accident. “They must be doing something right.”

The latest controversies to assail King/Drew have staff so edgy that none would risk speaking on the record, even in support of the 23-year-old medical center that was built in response to the Watts riots.

One janitor said that during his rounds pushing a broom through the hospital’s wards he notices the tension that has struck the staff. “They’re trying to keep it hush-hush,” he said of the controversies. “They go into offices, or like, when you go into a room, they’ll all be quiet all of a sudden.”

The conversation that does percolate out from the hospital frequently segues into broader issues of racial bias--the hospital is the only one in the region affiliated with a predominantly black school, the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

“The only time we got good publicity was in March of 1972,” quipped one high-level administrator, referring to the dedication of the hospital. “And that’s probably because [President Richard] Nixon called to congratulate us.”

In the cafeteria, one 20-year veteran issued her heated commentary between angry bites of an apple, cheered by a chorus of co-workers in scrubs. “My sister came in here in a car accident, and she had cracked ribs, and she’s leaving now,” she said.

“Not everybody gets killed who comes in here. First of all, it seems to me you people tend to exploit this hospital because it’s black and minority. We don’t get the fanfare of say, Harbor [UCLA Medical Center]. We’re getting a bad rap. We work hard, and God knows the kind of people we get here are not the best in the world. You wouldn’t want to meet some of them on a dark, dreary night,” she added.

Unlike at most hospitals, the way you get into King/Drew tends to be on your back. More than three-quarters of the center’s admissions come through its emergency room, compared to about 20% for hospitals statewide. King/Drew is trauma central, treating the kind of injuries encountered in war zones--multiple wounds from high-caliber bullets and the like. Those who have seen the emergency room miracles say that if such a violent fate should befall them, this is where they would want to be taken.

“Some of the cases that come through here are real bad,” said one worker familiar with the emergency room. “You don’t give us the credit for the people we pull through. We’ve had some phenomenal cases where people survived.”

Other workers told of uninsured patients arriving at King/Drew after being rejected by other facilities--even one person who arrived clinically dead and was revived.

Those success stories eventually filter out into the community, where they must clash with the long-standing Killer King nickname, said another worker, a 17-year veteran anesthesia technician. “Pretty soon the reality outweighs the stories and people catch up on it,” he said. “This is like political assassination. Instead of shooting them . . . you just destroy their reputation.”

Blood boils at the mere mention of politics, a side effect of the county’s recent cutbacks and layoffs at public hospitals.

“You got one hand, one side, saying we got problems and another that’s choking off the funds,” said one administrator.

“If you want to ensure a failure, cut off funds,” a fellow administrator added.

“The county supervisors always want to look at something,” said one woman. “And they always want to do it when they’re looking for a damn job. It’s always near elections.”

Only paces away from the cafeteria, patients crowd waiting rooms and huddle up to information desks. A mother walks out with a swaddled infant, and a homeless man wobbles in on crutches.

“Two of my children were born here and I’ve never had problems,” said Alejandro Esparza of Huntington Park, who was leaving the hospital after retrieving paperwork for his son, who was born there. “I have a lot of confidence in this hospital.”

Lorenza Garcia can say the same. Two of her children were born at King, and they have returned frequently for checkups and inoculations, she said.

“In Mexico, I didn’t ever go to the hospital,” she said. “There, you have children in the house.”

Jaime Duenas said he has visited King/Drew fewer than half a dozen times since he came from Mexico 12 years ago, each of those instances for births or other medical services for his two children. Like other clients, Duenas had heard bad stories about King/Drew. “The service has been good for us,” he said. “We’ve experienced the normal things, like waiting, things you expect.”

Still, a janitor on a break nearby was less sanguine. “Someone gets shot, they come here, and the first thing they want to do is go somewhere else,” he said. “I work here, but as for medical attention, I’m going somewhere else.”