Psychiatric Chief Psyched Up for Move to New Site

Dr. John Wong once spent his days dispensing psychiatric therapy from a comfortable office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Now his work is more like running a MASH unit for the mentally ill.

As head of Ventura County’s acute care center for psychiatric patients, he manages an aging facility often not large or secure enough for the patients it treats.

Unlike his Los Angeles clientele, about 90% of the patients who come through his hospital’s doors are “5150,” or admitted against their will because they are a danger to themselves or others.

“We are looked upon as the people who are taking away their freedom,” said Wong, who became the hospital’s medical director in September 1994. “The challenge here is to defuse that negative feeling and make the hospital a therapeutic milieu.”

He hopes that will become a little easier in July, when the county opens its new, $7.5-million mental health facility down the street from the old one on Hillmont Avenue.

As Wong pads past the future nurses’ station, past the soon-to-be patient rooms and dining area, this sprawling construction site still looks nothing like a hospital. A jumbo discount retailer maybe.

Thousands of thin wires dangle from the ceiling like swollen strands of silver hair. Pond-sized puddles from the latest rain dot the concrete floor.

Wong and other staff members will move out of a trailer near the old, beige-brick hospital and into offices at the new facility in about six months.

County mental health professionals are hoping the state-of-the-art hospital will also move the inpatient unit out of a past spotted with security lapses into a present of better care and safety.

“The improvement in security will be immense,” Wong said during a recent tour of the 31,000-square-foot skeleton of a building. “The old hospital was built in 1967 without fences, and there was a lot of elopement. This will be an excellent, closed facility.”

Already responsible for a $5.9-million budget and a staff of nearly 100, including five physicians, Wong is also saddled with making sure the move goes smoothly.

County officials are still cooing over having lured Wong, an associate clinical professor at the USC School of Medicine, to take the $120,000-a-year post.

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Wong replaced former medical director Dr. Oliver Swigert, who returned to private practice.

“To get a person of this caliber to run our inpatient unit is really amazing,” said Dr. Samuel Edwards, county hospital administrator. “We are very fortunate to have him here.”

Ed Mullen, the former CEO and president of Pasadena’s Las Encinas Hospital, where Wong worked in the mid-1980s, agrees.

“They are very lucky to have someone of John’s caliber and quality,” said Mullen, now a partner with the executive recruiting firm Korn Ferry International. “You can always tell a lot by how the nursing staff receives a physician. The nursing staff always sought John out to get a second opinion.”

On the psychiatric hospital grounds, staff members have come to regard Wong as the consummate problem-solver, the one to defuse any conflict, the one to go to for advice. Housekeepers, nurses and other psychiatrists know Wong as the dapper physician who loves his work and insists on the highest standards of care for patients.

“He has brought dignity to the post,” said Linda Erlin, the inpatient unit’s director of nursing. “He is a man who is here for honor, not for a paycheck. He is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He calls back faster than any physician I have ever worked with.”

A native of southern China, Wong earned his medical degree at Queen’s University in Canada and did his residency in psychiatry at Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus. Wong, 61, founded his Los Angeles private practice in 1969, and still sees patients on weekends.

Before coming to Ventura, Wong was medical director for the mental health unit at the San Gabriel Valley Medical Center.

Although Wong’s job does not call for him to see patients, he routinely meets with groups of them to discuss their medication and its side effects. He has won kudos for his efforts to integrate psychiatry into the mainstream medical community by building stronger ties between the psychiatric unit and the county hospital.

Wong calls his position both a dream job and a relentless challenge. He compares it to the rapid-fire environment of his internship at a Toronto hospital in 1959, delivering babies, removing appendixes and working in the emergency room.

“I love crisis resolution,” said the soft-spoken doctor who reveals himself slowly. “This job really fits me like a glove. I find acute care much more gratifying than [private practice].”

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Complicating patients’ psychiatric problems are the physical limitations of the Ventura facility.

Built when the county sent the most seriously mentally ill patients to Camarillo State Hospital, the acute care hospital has lacked adequate security for its current mix of patients, including those suffering from psychotic episodes or suicidal tendencies.

Last May, a Ventura police officer shot and killed a Santa Paula man after the patient walked away from the old facility and repeatedly swung a wooden club at officers trying to subdue him.

In recent years, before Wong joined the medical staff, two patients had escaped and killed themselves, according to the state Department of Health Services.

In 1992, a mentally ill man escaped from nearby Ventura County Medical Center and killed a woman in the neighborhood, raising fears in the community about the acute care unit.

The new building should resolve many of these problems.

While the doors to patients’ rooms cannot be locked from the outside at the old facility because of fire regulations, the new hospital will have a high-tech, keyless system. Only staff members will have the wristband sensors that unlock hospital doors.

And 14-foot masonry walls will surround the building’s four outdoor courtyards. Staff members at the old hospital built eight-foot wooden walls to enclose open areas, but patients could still scale the barriers.

“From a care point of view, the staff [in the new hospital] will be able to focus on treatment rather than on security,” said Penny Matthews, who directs the county’s acute care services for the mentally ill. “A lot of time is now spent making sure the patient is still here.”

Wong’s decision to accept the Ventura job came shortly after his wife, Lily Wong, a multimillionaire developer, purchased Ventura’s Harbortown Marina Resort in Ventura in 1993. A son and daughter now work there in the management ranks.

The family still keeps a home in posh San Marino, but Wong has a suite overlooking the boat marina at Harbortown, where he stays during the week.

Away from the hospital, Wong spends time watching sports, singing karaoke, playing the harmonica and keeping up with his four children.

“He writes me twice a week since I moved here,” said his 24-year-old daughter Gloria Wong, who is an assistant at Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York. “Can you believe it?”

Wong, a specialist in geriatric psychiatry, credits his father for sparking his interest in medicine. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Wong’s father moved to Guangzhou, then Canton, in 1926 after earning a dental degree at the University of Minnesota.

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In China, Min Sam Wong started a dental practice, becoming an instant celebrity. There were few American-educated dentists and no formal dental schools in the region at the time. Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Chinese leader, was one of his patients.

The elder Wong’s practice soon became a de facto dental school. He helped train more than a dozen dentists, who fanned out and started their own practices.

“I probably used the same model when I opened my own practice,” said Wong, whose practice now includes three other mental health professionals. “I also somehow ended up becoming a teacher at USC.”

Wong first thought about becoming a psychiatrist while a college student in Kingston, Ontario. Although he grins at the cliche, he said students would routinely seek him out for advice, even though he was often the one plagued by homesickness.

“Even in Canada when I was a lonely foreign student, they would come and talk to me about their problems,” he said. “These people who had it made, who had everything, would come to me.”

Until the new hospital is completed, Wong has settled into a boxy, wood-paneled office in a brown trailer that sits just a few feet from the current inpatient unit. His phone buzzes relentlessly. To dress up the spartan office, Wong has populated the walls and desk with Chinese art.

His favorite piece is a Taiwanese painting depicting a vast tableau of craggy peaks, slathered with a dreamy layer of clouds.

“It gives you a perspective on life,” Wong said, fiddling with his glasses. “It’s that wilderness out there.”