Stick to Basics at King/Drew
Four months into the job, the private management firm with the $13.2-million contract to turn around the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center has asked the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a $3.4-million raise. A spokeswoman for Navigant Consulting Inc. said conditions at the county-owned hospital were worse than the firm had anticipated when it submitted its bid for the one-year contract.
Worse than expected? Hello? Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the botched care, the malpractice suits, the boondoggle of workers’ compensation claims for falling off chairs knows that King/Drew is one very sick hospital. Sure, some tweaks to the contract were to be expected once Navigant actually got in the door, but a 25% increase? This does not exactly inspire confidence. Neither does the departure of two key members of Navigant’s King/Drew team, one because her commute from North Carolina made it hard to put in a full week’s work. Well, duh.
The supervisors are in a bind. The county’s own health department has tried but failed to right the foundering hospital. Last year it drafted top managers from the county’s other hospitals to run King/Drew and brought in another private consulting firm to rebuild the nursing department. Yet according to Navigant’s request for more money, “even simple, basic operational systems” remain broken.
Whether Navigant itself is going to be able to fix them is an open question. It helps that the well-known turnaround agency’s reputation is at stake -- and that the hospital born of the 1965 Watts riot is a high-profile issue. It also helps that the supervisors built benchmarks into Navigant’s contract. But before they can begin checking those markers, much less decide whether to pay the firm more money, they have to make sure their goals are realistic.
Supervisors need to ask whether they are once again putting politics ahead of patients in maintaining a hospital this troubled as an academic and research institution rather than downsizing to a community hospital dedicated solely to delivering quality care. And they must ask whether, having closed King/Drew’s trauma center to relieve pressure on the rest of the hospital, they have made reopening it too high -- and too political -- a priority.
We are not arguing that the hospital should never again aspire to be a respected academic center, or that the supervisors shouldn’t revisit their controversial decision to close the trauma center if the substitute put in place can’t meet demand. But the basics have to come first.
What comes after that would best be determined by an independent healthcare authority with a big-picture view of the county’s needs. Asking the Legislature to establish such a countywide authority, and then stepping out of day-to-day governance, is the best long-term fix the supervisors can offer King/Drew.
