New Turmoil Hits Troubled King Hospital

A long-running struggle for control of troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center’s busy emergency room escalated Thursday after county doctors received job applications from a private medical group that wants to take over the heart of the county’s second-busiest trauma center.

The letters sent to the doctors’ homes say that California Emergency Physicians Medical Group anticipates contracting with the hospital to provide “emergency services in the near future.”

The county doctors were told that they should immediately complete and return a job application to the Oakland-based group if they want to remain on the staff and continue practicing at the county-run medical center near Watts.

“If in fact we do obtain the contract, it could be on short notice, so I encourage you to complete the application immediately and return it as we will also be entertaining other candidates as well as those already on staff,” recruiting manager John Gravette wrote.

Assistant Health Services Director Walter Gray said the county had received an “unsolicited” joint proposal by California Emergency Physicians and Drew University Medical School, based at the hospital, to take over the emergency room.

Gray said that county health department officials were evaluating the proposal. “They kind of jumped the gun,” he said.

“We have made no decision,” said the county’s new health services director, Mark Finucane. Before any contract is awarded, he said, there will be an open bidding process. “We’ll see things done in a methodical way.”

Asked why a private group would send such a letter to county doctors, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said: “It seems quite irregular. . . . I’m shocked that they are doing that.”

Gray said the proposal will be evaluated based on what is best for patient care, whether it saves the county money and meets regulatory requirements. It is a common practice for private hospitals to contract with a private group of doctors for emergency services, although none of Los Angeles County’s hospitals have done so.

John Vidaurri, a spokesman for the California Emergency Physicians group, declined to discuss the contract issue and referred calls to Gray. Vidaurri described the letter as a standard practice to recruit doctors.

But the letters and job applications only served to fuel a long-simmering dispute over control of the emergency room, which is the gateway to the hospital for most patients.

Only Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors agreed to meet behind closed doors early next month to review a recent county Civil Service Commission decision that found a pattern of job discrimination against nonblacks at the hospital.

Last week, the commission affirmed a hearing officer’s conclusion that the hospital and affiliated medical school had “an unwritten policy of maintaining itself as a black institution and of placing black candidates in positions of leadership . . . to the exclusion of nonblacks.”

At the urging of Supervisor Gloria Molina, the board decided to meet privately to discuss the commission’s ruling that the hospital specifically has discriminated against the former head of its emergency room.

Molina said the county must confront the discrimination issue and not obstruct finding a remedy for the problem.

“My concern is on its face, we look as ugly as those governors and those elected officials in Alabama and Mississippi years ago who denied black children [entrance] to our universities and our public schools,” Molina said. “I hope that is not the case here in L.A. County.”

In a heated exchange, Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, president of Drew University, said the only African American medical school west of the Mississippi has been disparaged publicly and done an injustice by the commission’s findings. He said the school and hospital has the best record of diversity of all six county hospitals. “There is more than one victim,” he said.

Burke has advocated a management shake-up at the hospital after The Times reported that one patient contracted the AIDS virus after a transfusion because of problems in the hospital’s blood bank and urged investigations of doctors for allegedly moonlighting and diverting patients to their private practices.

Burke declined to take a position on contracting out the emergency room, but said that critical part of the hospital has “got to get over some of the problems.”