Fast Track at King/Drew
It’s everyone’s worst medical nightmare. A loved one undergoes a hospital procedure that is anything but radical, and suddenly, inexplicably, he is dead. At a time when answers are the best that one can hope for, there are no answers to be found. The hospital quickly and perfunctorily moves past your loss. And that’s exactly what might have happened in the case of Charles Hamilton, had a family member not demanded a private autopsy.
Hamilton died in June 1995 at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center from a risky and unnecessary procedure. It was performed by an unsupervised, first-year surgical intern who had been turned down by dozens of teaching hospitals in the United States and Canada. Once the damage was done, a “code blue” emergency was sounded, but more than half an hour passed before a staff doctor showed up, too late.
That was more than enough cause for the $625,000 settlement that Hamilton’s widow will receive from Los Angeles County, but there is more that ought to concern the county supervisors and health officials.
To be sure, King/Drew is not the only hospital where staggering errors occur. Just last week, for example, the University of California agreed to a $20.2-million settlement in the case of a Garden Grove woman who remains comatose after hand surgery at the UC Irvine Medical Center more than four years ago.
But there’s the appalling matter of King/Drew’s medical and legal records on the Hamilton case, which show that the hospital essentially closed its books on the incident before the body was sent to the morgue. Required forms on cause of death were either left blank or made no mention of the unnecessary procedure that contributed to Hamilton’s death. What is this, the medical application of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy? At the very least, this leads to serious questions about the way the hospital’s patients and their families are treated.
At its Tuesday meeting, the county Board of Supervisors asked for a report on the incident. The county needs to see that Hamilton’s survivors quickly obtain the $625,000 settlement. That’s the easy part. What will take much longer is a clear accounting of procedures and practices at this and the county’s other public hospitals to prevent such cases in the future.
