To Be a Patient at County: ‘Degrading’

You cannot imagine the sorrow I felt when I read the two June 26 articles regarding the emergency department at L.A. County-USC Medical Center. Sorrow because, though I haven’t been there in almost 10 years, I read that patients are “cared for” in exactly the same way as they were almost 25 years ago, when I was an emergency medicine resident there, and for years before that. This archaic, inhumane, crowded, dirty, loud, diseased place in the middle of the ER, this C-Booth, where the sickest of the sick are supposed to go, still exists.

The administration of the department of emergency medicine is still absolutely incapable of solving the basic problems of patient flow, appropriate admissions policy and expeditious care that it has had for 30 years--still blaming everyone else for the horrendous, inhumane, substandard care patients get there. The same problems, the same administration. The same county administration at the Department of Health Services and at the Board of Supervisors is still without an iota of vision, still incapable of taking even the simplest of steps to solve the same problems it has helped to create over at least 30 years, still pointing fingers at everyone else outside of L.A. County.

To be a patient there is a degrading, hopeless experience that no sick human being should ever have to undergo.

Joseph Morales MD

Davis

Your article fails to address the real cause of the breakdown of services--the overburdening of the system by illegal aliens (translation for your editorial staff: undocumented workers). The very people you weepingly describe in heroic terms, dying in the desert in search of a better life, are contributing to the collapse of the system by overwhelming it.

Michael A. Padgett

Mission Viejo