Posted on 04/13/2005 8:50:14 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The head of the Los Angeles County health department was ordered to move his office into troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center by supervisors frustrated by continuing reports of deaths and poor patient care.
"Park yourself there," Supervisor Gloria Molina directed Dr. Thomas Garthwaite during a contentious supervisors' meeting Tuesday.
"Take your schedule. Tear it up and spend every moment that you're working for us working on solving the crisis," she said.
Garthwaite said his department had taken disciplinary actions against hundreds of King/Drew employees.
Supervisors also ordered the Department of Health Services to hire outside doctors and nurses to monitor patient care at King/Drew. The department also was told to require that a senior physician oversee all tests and invasive procedures performed by residents and doctor trainees.
In addition, the health department will review whether the county should end a contract with the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science to train doctors at the hospital.
The county-owned medical center in South Los Angeles opened in 1972 in the wake of the Watts riots. It is the only medical center in the poor, mainly black and Hispanic inner-city community.
However, it has been under fire since 2003 because of a series of patient deaths blamed on shoddy care.
The hospital's trauma center was closed last fall and in February, the hospital lost its accreditation from a national group.
Last November, supervisors agreed to pay Navigant Consulting Inc. $13.2 million to run the hospital for a year to improve care.
On Monday, however, county health officials notified supervisors that a patient died of an aneurysm in January after emergency room staff mistakenly classified his case as non-urgent, and a patient died last month when nurses ignored warning signs from a heart monitor.
Last week, hospital officials reported that three other patients received slipshod medical care before they died within days of each other in late March.
The most recent deaths are under review by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, regional administrator Jeff Flick said.
In a separate action Tuesday, the supervisors approved $150,000 to settle a claim filed by the mother of a 20-year-old man who died at King/Drew in March 2003.
Oluchi McDonald was admitted for abdominal pain. Instead of surgery he received only antibiotics, and nurses failed to notify doctors that he had an abnormally high heart rate.
He died 30 hours later of gangrene and blood loss from a twisted bowel.
Despite its problems, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said Tuesday that she was committed to keeping open the medical center, which is in her district.
"That hospital will be closed over my dead body," Burke said.
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said later: "The only dead bodies I'm concerned about are the dead bodies that we're seeing here."
The problem at King /Drew is a perfect example of the inmates running the asylum. The craziness however, has racial overtones. This facility is predominately black, run by blacks for blacks, but the black people capable of running the medical center effectively have left the Watts area for better hospitals and better housing. What was left, after the exodus of the capable, are now running this monument to minority politics into the ground.
If you want real reform, start requiring all city and county employees, including the mayor and council, to receive their insured medical treatments there.
Who is Drew? And why doesn't he/she get his/her full name included in the facility name?
That works for me.
I hope she doesn't waffle on this!
Charles R. Drew University is the school attached to the Hospital...
Charles Richard Drew, MD
June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science is named in honor of the brilliant African-American physician, famous for his pioneering work in blood preservation. The University, in its emphasis on service to the community, draws its inspiration from the life of Drew, whose short 46 years were full of achievements, learning and sharing of his knowledge to benefit mankind.
Charles R. Drew was born June 3, 1904, in Washington, D.C. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where his athletic prowess in track and football earned him the Mossman trophy as the man who contributed the most to athletics for four years. He then taught biology and served as coach at Morgan State College in Baltimore before entering McGill University School of Medicine in Montreal. As a medical student, Drew became an Alpha Omega Alpha Scholar and won the J. Francis Williams Fellowship, based on a competitive examination given annually to the top five students in his graduating class. Drew received his MD degree in 1933 and served his first appointment as a faculty instructor in pathology at Howard University, from 1935 to 1936. He then became an instructor in surgery and an assistant surgeon at Freedman's Hospital, a federally operated facility associated with Howard University.
In 1938, Drew was awarded a two-year Rockefeller fellowship in surgery and he began postgraduate work, earning his Doctor of Science in Surgery at Columbia University. His doctoral thesis, "Banked Blood" was based on an exhaustive study of blood preservation techniques. It was while he was engaged in research at Columbia's Presbyterian Hospital that his ultimate destiny in serving mankind was shaped. The military emergency of World War II had a demanding vital need for information and procedures on how to preserve blood.
As the European war scene became more violent and the need for blood plasma intensified, Drew, as the leading authority in the field, was selected as the full-time medical director of the Blood for Britain project. He supervised the successful collection of 14,500 pints of vital plasma for the British. In February 1941, Drew was appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood Bank, in charge of blood for use by the U.S. Army and Navy. During this time, Drew agitated the authorities to stop excluding the blood of African-Americans from plasma-supply networks, and in 1942, he resigned his official posts after the armed forces ruled that the blood of African-Americans would be accepted but would have to be stored separately from that of whites.
The NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1944 in recognition of his work on the British and American projects. Virginia State College presented him an honorary doctor of science degree in 1945, as did his alma mater Amherst in 1947.
Drew returned to Freedman's Hospital and Howard University where he served as a professor of medicine and surgeon from 1942 to 1950. On April 1, 1950, Drew was motoring with three colleagues to the annual meeting of the John A. Andrews Association in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he was killed in a one-car accident. The automobile struck the soft shoulder of the road and overturned. Drew was severely injured and rushed to nearby Alamance County General Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina. In the words of his widow, "everything was done in his fight for life" by the medical staff. However, it was too late to save him.
At his untimely death, Charles R. Drew left behind a devoted wife, Lenore, four children and a legacy of inspirational, unstinting dedication to service for all people. In 1981, the U.S. Postal Service paid tribute to Drew by issuing in his honor, a stamp in the GREAT AMERICANS Series.
They have another LA County facility just down the road - maybe 10 miles away. With the record of King Drew and that it is in a very dangerous part of town, they should just close the place down.
Dumping money into an investigation and more nurses to look after nurses is a waste of resources.
John and Ken are calling this place the "King/Drew DEATH CENTER"
haha
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.