The Examination of King/Drew

The in-depth report on “The Troubles at King/Drew” (Dec. 5 and 6) and the editorial, “Eyes Averted” (Dec. 5), are first-rate. Your facts and observations clearly show that most organizations fail when their staff believes that jobs and institutional survival depend more on politics than on quality service. Politics allows us to avoid reality for a while but never indefinitely. King/Drew can be a first-rate medical center if its staff and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors stop covering up problems and make outstanding medical care their first priority.

Frank Kline

Rolling Hills Estates

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In your unrelenting attack on King/Drew Medical Center, you fail to address several issues. For example, how many lives have been saved, and lifetime disabilities prevented, by the existence of King/Drew ? What of the overwhelming majority of employees who struggle daily to help improve the health of their community? And what do you propose as the beginnings of solutions to the problems that do exist? If you have ideas that would help ameliorate some of the intractable problems, whose real causes are poverty and a broken medical system nationally, this would be an ideal time to put them forward.

Norman Palley

Culver City

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I wish to compliment The Times for its well-researched and carefully documented report on the fiscal problems faced by the King /Drew Medical Center. I applaud The Times for having the temerity to take on a sacred cow, i.e., the oft-repeated claim that King/Drew has been deliberately and maliciously underfunded with the intent of starving it out of existence, a belief echoed by former King/Drew doctor Ernie Smith when he appeared at a town hall meeting in 2003 and placed the blame for King/Drew’s problems on racism and white supremacy.

Now it appears that the blame for problems needs to be placed not on sinister outside forces but squarely on the shoulders of those who directly administer the hospital.

I don’t expect The Times’ report to be well-received by all those who support the notion that King/Drew is always deliberately given the short end of the budget stick, but maybe enough members of the community served by King/Drew will listen and demand that those who have wreaked such havoc on the center’s budget be removed and replaced by persons of goodwill, who will be more concerned with the community than their wallets.

Mary Bernsen

Garden Grove

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Kudos for telling the unvarnished truth about King/Drew’s long-standing and very serious problems. Now what I want to know is, if Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) was ready to stand on someone’s desk to keep the neonatal unit open, on whose desk was she standing all these years to protest the incompetent care at the hospital?

Ron Fineman

Valencia

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These stories are doing an excellent job of describing, objectively, the troubles and politics that plague this hospital. I am appalled at the mismanagement and derelict behaviors on the part of the staff members, and at the environment this institution fosters. I believe that it is only by examining the problem in its totality that those involved can unravel new solutions to these grave and deadly circumstances at King/Drew. These conditions are exemplary of why we need in-depth reporting. Great job, writers, for the honest, bold and thorough coverage of this necessary look into what went wrong with this county hospital so many depended on.

Brenda Wilde Hubbs

Carlsbad

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The best way to improve medical care at King/Drew Hospital is to require the L.A. County supervisors to get their own medical care there.

Gary A. Robb

Los Feliz