Most of the employees at a beleaguered inner city hospital under review for allegedly mishandling the care of patients have remained at the facility despite promises to weed out underperforming staff members, health officials said. County health officials disclosed during a Board of Supervisors meeting Monday that they had reassigned from Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital only about one-third of the 1,200 employees they initially projected would be shifted to other institutions as part of a reform effort.
Bruce Chernof, director of the Department of Health Services which operates the hospital, said the estimate of the staff changes needed was not a "terribly informed number, because nobody's ever done anything like this ever before." Supervisors ordered health officials and hospital administrators to appear in person Tuesday to answer more questions about what's being done to correct problems at the hospital, which faces losing vital federal funds. "We're in the situation we're in because we didn't go as far as we knew we needed to go in purging the organization of its underperforming personnel," supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Monday.
King-Harbor has been cited more than a dozen times in 3 1/2 years for inadequate care that has led to patient deaths and injuries. More recently it has come under scrutiny for alleged mistreatment of patients in the emergency room. A woman last month died after writhing untreated on the floor of the ER lobby for 45 minutes, and in February, a brain tumor patient languished in the emergency room for four days before his family drove him to another hospital for emergency surgery.
Federal inspectors concluded in a recent report, based partly on the February case, that King-Harbor's emergency room patients are in "immediate jeopardy." The radical downsizing was part of a plan outlined last year to hold off regulators who have threatened to pull federal funding that provides much of the hospital's budget. Chernof wrote to the U.
S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in October that "every employee and every physician" would be reassigned." But most of the employees remain in place.
Chernof said all hospital employees had to be re-interviewed for their jobs and those employees who did not receive good or competent evaluations were sent to other areas of the Department of Health Services. The hospital, formerly known as Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center, was built in unincorporated Willowbrook several years after the 1965 Watts riot to provide badly needed medical care in the South Los Angeles area.
It has faced the risk of losing its federal certification and funding before, but has been able to avoid it. Arnold Schwarzenegger has intervened in the past to keep the hospital certified. Hospital officials have tried to make improvements.
The hospital closed its trauma unit, hired new managers, spent millions of dollars on consulting and scaled back the number of beds from more than 200 to 42. Return to Top Most of the employees at a beleaguered inner city hospital under review for allegedly mishandling the care of patients have remained at the facility despite promises to weed out underperforming staff members, health officials said.
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