King/Drew Flawed but a Lifesaver, Residents Say

Inside the shuttle bus that snaked around South Los Angeles and made a stop at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, the fate of the troubled hospital charged the small confines with emotion.

The passengers had heard about the patient deaths, the failed inspections, the seemingly constant political turmoil. To them, though, the hospital may be imperfect, burdened with a great responsibility, deeply flawed -- but it is ultimately irreplaceable.

“Black people call it ‘Killer King,’ but it’s not a killer,” said 34-year-old Carmelita Kaiser, cradling her baby in her arms. “This place has saved a lot of lives. It’s the fastest hospital they’re going to take you to if you’re really in trouble.”

A few seats down, Eleazar Gonzalez, a 66-year-old Mexican immigrant, agreed. “Money or no money, they take you,” he said. “No hospital is perfect.”

On the bus and elsewhere in the urban neighborhoods served by King/Drew, residents talk with a defensive pride about the hospital, at times downplaying its problems and saying no one focuses on the good it does.

In a hard-knocks community where sudden, and often violent, death is a part of life, there seems to be a high capacity to forgive King/Drew’s problems.

Decades of medical errors came to a head last month when federal regulators notified the hospital that it had failed a “make or break” inspection and would lose about $200 million in annual funding.

Over the last three years, regulators have found King/Drew out of compliance with minimum standards required to receive federal funding. They have cited numerous instances of patients who were harmed or killed because of medical mistakes, a finding also detailed in a five-part series by The Times in 2004.

In response to the inspection failure, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has agreed in principle to dramatically reduce services at King/Drew and turn over its management and some of its services to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, which is about 10 miles away.

Those who live around the hospital, which is in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, said the decision leaves them anxious. Now they will have to travel farther to get any medical attention, a tricky feat for patients without cars.

They also blame county leaders for not doing more to fix the hospital, pointing out angrily that the county closed King/Drew’s trauma center last year in an earlier reform effort.

“One of my friends had a gunshot wound, but he was saved there,” said Mildred Starks, 28. “The hospital has a name behind it. We need to keep it alive. Now they’re trying to turn it to nothing.”

But Carol Meyer, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency, said there have been no excess trauma deaths since the trauma center closed.

“It’s not the amount of distance you travel; it’s getting to a well equipped, well performing trauma center,” she said. “The bottom line is MLK had too much on its plate. It was overwhelmed.”

But she said she understood how people felt in neighborhoods served by King/Drew.

“That’s all they have,” Meyer said. “People with options are more critical of a hospital that has problems.”

It was a point Derek Moore, 40, tried to drive home on the shuttle bus ride. Referring to the quick trip, he asked: How long do you think it will take for us to get to the hospital?

Many people with serious medical problems don’t have their own transportation, Moore said. But here, they have a shuttle and a hospital often within their view.

A few minutes later, the vehicle passed the hospital, and Moore flashed a smile.

“You feel good because you got options,” he said to a reporter. “But you see, I don’t. I have to go with what I’ve got.”

Many people did not have to dig deep to plumb the gratitude they felt toward the hospital -- however routine or complicated the procedure that helped them or a loved one.

“I don’t have a problem” with King/Drew, said Claudette Jackson, 51, whose father was rushed there after he had a serious heart attack a few years ago. “They saved my daddy’s life.”

Eleazar Gonzalez said that to a poor man with no money, “the hospital is beautiful.”

He was appreciative that hospital staff diagnosed him with asthma years ago. And yet, Gonzalez said, he lost a cousin at King/Drew because of what he described as a bungled medical procedure.

Despite this, he said, neither he nor other members of his family hold a grudge against the hospital.

“You have no insurance and benefits, and you’ll still get some treatment there,” Gonzalez said. “Where else are you going to go around here?”

Some disenchanted patients who have experienced problems at King/Drew have ended up going to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Torrance for care.

One of them is Isaac Cole, who was at the Harbor-UCLA pharmacy’s waiting area Wednesday. He lives minutes from King/Drew but said that since a bad experience there three years ago, he has opted for the 90-minute round-trip bus ride to Harbor to receive care for his twin knee replacements and diabetes.

“They don’t have empathetic staff there,” he said of King/Drew. “No empathy. That scared me.... It’s a mess there.”

Leroy West, 76, sat in a wheelchair at Harbor-UCLA, puffing a cigarette and waiting for his prescriptions to be filled. Like Cole, he lives only a few minutes from King/Drew. But 10 years ago, he said, he received poor care in the emergency room when he arrived with a burst appendix. So now he too travels the 90 minutes to and from Harbor-UCLA.

Such stories, however, don’t deter King/Drew supporters.

On a bench across from the hospital, Londia Keys, 49, and Benita Wright, 44, repeated one phrase like a mantra: “Nobody is perfect.”

Keys credits King/Drew with saving her life when she was a drug addict and contracted tuberculosis and pneumonia. She said the doctors treated her at a time when she felt as if she had no hope and was at the lowest point in her life.

“I lost a lung, but they saved my life. So I say, ‘Thank you,’ Keys said. “They are all right by me.”

Nor did she have to pay for a surgery she could never have afforded, she added.

“It was major surgery,” Keys said. “They just about cut me in half.”

Wright started talking about how her younger sister died at King, before immediately stopping herself and issuing a clarification.

“It wasn’t their fault. There was nothing they could have done for her. They did all they could.”

hector.becerra@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Nancy Wride and Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.