King/Drew’s Real Problem

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected to approve an eye-popping $13-million contract Tuesday for a private firm to take over management of the Martin Luther King Jr./Charles R. Drew Medical Center. The supervisors have no choice but to bring in outside help, and not just because they have failed completely to fix the long-troubled county hospital. The federal government said: Do this or lose $200 million in funding -- half the hospital’s annual budget.

Here’s the catch: Even multimillion-dollar experts won’t be able to fix King/Drew unless the county is truly committed to change.

The supervisors’ willingness to invest this much money should at least end speculation that they are plotting to shutter the South Los Angeles hospital. Such reassurance, however, has been drowned out in the uproar over their simultaneous call to close King/Drew’s trauma center. The reasoning of the decision was sound -- freeing nurses and other scarce resources for hospital trouble spots -- but the supervisors should have matched this rare boldness with the courage to be public about it. They probably violated state law in making the decision in secret. On the other bank of the divide, elected leaders, hospital employees and neighborhood activists have been in denial about how badly patient safety is jeopardized at King/Drew, and too ready to exploit racial tensions.

That now dismayingly includes Mayor James K. Hahn, who said last week that the hospital “has been under attack since Day 1” by people “who have never accepted that people of color” can run a hospital. It was the elected leaders making this sort of accusation who looked the other way as the hospital’s problems multiplied, until accrediting agencies and federal regulators threatened to close King/Drew altogether.

Dr. Michael E. Drake, vice president of health affairs for the University of California system, has been working to shore up King/Drew’s problem-plagued doctor training programs. “I hope,” he said in an interview, “everyone can take a step back and say that the problems aren’t each other but poverty and disease.” If only Drake had held the microphone instead of the mayor.