No tabs kept on hospital workers

Under withering criticism, Los Angeles County health officials acknowledged Tuesday that they had not used a key database intended to track and weed out problem employees from Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital for nearly a year.

John Schunhoff, interim Health Services Department director, told the Board of Supervisors that at least some employees had been fired or disciplined since the hospital closed its inpatient and emergency services in August and sent many of its workers to other county facilities. But since then, top managers have been unable to track the employees’ locations and their subsequent performance and disciplinary status.

Schunhoff also acknowledged that at least one disciplined King-Harbor staffer -- found to have fallen asleep while watching a heart monitor in 2005 -- has since been promoted.

“The department was not serious about really doing anything about the problem employees,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

He was joined by his four colleagues in a public chiding of the department after The Times last week reported that seriously disciplined employees continued to work.

“It did not have a sense of urgency about it. . . . I feel burned by it,” Yaroslavsky said.

The supervisors’ statements came after years of broken promises by them to root out the malaise and neglect that figured prominently in federal regulators’ decision last year to pull funding after finding that the hospital failed to meet minimum standards for patient care.

“It wasn’t the department that was criticized or penalized as a governing board. It was ourselves,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said. “We were dinged by [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] as an irresponsible governing board . . . because we empowered the department.”

Once the hospital closed, except for some outpatient clinics, and its workers were reassigned, officials promised to keep tabs on employees who had been disciplined for serious lapses.

But they said that the database tracking employees from King-Harbor hospital, previously named King-Drew, went dormant after it was transferred in early 2007 from the county’s Human Resources Department to the Health Services Department. It was corrupted sometime after the transfer, and no one noticed until The Times requested it in recent weeks.

Schunhoff said that county technicians resurrected the database Monday and learned that the last time it was accessed was in August.

Workers are now attempting to update the computer records by manually reviewing the files of the 1,600 employees who were working at the hospital when it closed.

County Chief Executive William T. Fujioka said that he expected that the restored files would show that the county had made some progress in its effort to fire or discipline problem workers under county employment rules. For instance, he said, out of 96 employees who were habitually absent without explanation, 60 have been fired, disciplined, placed on disability or returned to work.

The attention to the latest deficiencies in oversight coincided with a decision by Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley that no one would be prosecuted for one of the hospital’s most notorious failures.

A series of physician mistakes, rather than indifference by staff, at King-Harbor led to the death of a patient last year who writhed untreated on the hospital’s waiting room floor for 45 minutes, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Edith Rodriguez’s death became a symbol of bureaucratic indifference and renewed criticism of patient care at the troubled Willowbrook hospital.

County prosecutors sharply criticized the actions of a triage nurse on duty that night, accusing her of acting recklessly when she ignored Rodriguez’s cries of pain and the repeated warnings of county police and other hospital staff.

Nurse Linda Ruttlen, prosecutors said, threatened to throw out a patient who complained about the lack of care Rodriguez was receiving and then tried to encourage her colleagues to lie about the events that led up to the death.

But in a letter to sheriff’s detectives, Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Schwartz said prosecutors would not file criminal charges against Ruttlen because it was doubtful that her actions were “a substantial factor” in Rodriguez’s death.

Rather, Schwartz said, a medical expert consulted by the district attorney’s office blamed the death on a failure by hospital physicians to properly diagnose Rodriguez’s perforated bowel, the eventual cause of death.

Physicians initially believed that Rodriguez had gallstones -- a misdiagnosis relied upon over several weeks of treatment. By the time she pleaded for medical help May 9, 2007, it was already too late, Schwartz wrote.

“When Edith Rodriguez presented in the emergency room on the night of her death, prompt intervention would not have saved her life,” Schwartz wrote in the 11-page letter explaining the decision not to file charges.

There was no evidence that the physicians who treated Rodriguez acted recklessly or were criminally negligent, she wrote.

An attorney representing Rodriguez’s family in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the county said the patient’s three adult children were disappointed by the decision.

“This is just another blow to them,” Franklin Casco Jr. said. “They were hoping that the district attorney’s office would be aggressive and would file some sort of criminal charges against someone. . . . But unfortunately, the district attorney’s office has let them down.”

The family’s lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in January.

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