Review Faults Trauma Center

The care provided by the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center is “poor to marginal,” according to findings by two nationally recognized trauma experts.

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which runs King/Drew, released a one-page executive summary of the reviewers’ conclusions late Tuesday. A full report is due in about two weeks.

Some supporters of the trauma center -- which treats life-threatening gunshot wounds, stabbings and injuries sustained in car accidents -- questioned the timing of the document’s release.

Just one day earlier, the county Board of Supervisors held a six-hour hearing in which more than 90 speakers objected to their proposal to close the trauma unit, the second busiest in the county.

“It wasn’t disclosed yesterday when we were there all day,” said Adrian Dove, chairman of the California Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group. “It’s troubling timing.”

In a letter dated Monday, Drs. Robert Coscia and Gill Cryer noted that King/Drew’s trauma center suffered from the same problems as the hospital as a whole.

These include a shortage of nurses, an insufficient number of intensive-care beds, inadequate documentation and a flawed method of correcting medical problems.

Cryer is head of trauma at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood and Coscia has been chairman of the American College of Surgeons’ panel that reviews the quality of trauma centers nationwide. The county plans to pay the pair less than $10,000 for their work.

Last week, the physicians visited the trauma center in Willowbrook, south of Watts, spoke to staff members and reviewed a sample of about 20 records from patients treated there this year.

Their preliminary findings are somewhat more critical than those of inspectors from the American College of Surgeons. In 2003, those reviewers said care was “fair” and refused to restore their endorsement, which they had pulled from the facility in 1999. The endorsement is not required but is considered desirable as an indicator of quality.

The county’s health director, Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, said he asked for the latest review last month because hospital supporters had claimed King/Drew had one of the best trauma programs in the nation.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, a strong supporter of the hospital, said King/Drew’s problems could be solved if the county hired more nurses and worked with nurses, doctors and professionals.

“Everything keeps coming back to the one issue of a nursing shortage,” she said. “Everyone who’s looked at it has found that to be true.”

Garthwaite said his agency continues to try to recruit nurses and settle a contract dispute that would give nurses a bonus if they worked at King/Drew.

“We’re hiring every nurse that’s capable that applies,” he said.

Garthwaite has maintained that the trauma center should be closed, not because of its own problems, but because officials need to focus on fixing the rest of the hospital.

Critics of the proposal say if the trauma unit is closed, patients will have to travel farther for care -- and some will die.

Also Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors approved a contract with California Hospital Medical Center, near downtown Los Angeles, to open the first new trauma center in the county in about a decade. The supervisors voted 4 to 0, with Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke abstaining, to pay California Hospital a maximum of $3.98 million through June.

The hospital would be asked to absorb hundreds of patients treated by King/Drew if its trauma center closes.

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Times staff writers Jack Leonard and Jia-Rui Chong contributed to this report.