Unable to draft with a realistic plan for curing King/Drew Medical Center's terminal case of mismanagement, the L.A. County Supervisors have decided to raise the mortality rate in surrounding neighborhoods.
That's right - as the Times reports this morning, the Supes would rather shut King/Drew's trauma center and help cure the rest of the hospital at a leisurely pace than work harder on the root causes of the crisis.
Listen - nearly half of King/Drew's trauma patients - almost 1,000 last year - were shooting and stabbing victims. How many of them do you think would have survived the long drives to trauma centers at County/USC or Harbor/UCLA? The county's rationale is chillingly cruel, a sort of destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it stance:
Jim Lott, the executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, said the decision to close the hospital's trauma unit was the right call given King/Drew's problems, which have led to repeated incidents of patients being injured, and in some cases killed, as a result of medical errors.
"They need to do that in order to maintain patient safety. That's an absolutely hard but necessary decision for them to make," Lott said.
Necessary? Bullshit. King/Drew's long and sordid history of unneeded fatalities and horrific malpractice cases stem pretty clearly from poor administration - and the inability of replacement administrators to handle the job in a short time. The county health department has already removed King/Drew's administrator and medical director and brought in a nursing turn-around team and crisis-management experts to help appease the host of regulators breathing down the county's neck.
But they need more time - and a little sharper whip-cracking from the county to cure the hospital's systemic problems. Letting more people die is not the solution.
What's really frightening is that Assemblyman Mark Ridley Thomas is willing to screw his own district in the name of bureaucratic efficiency:
But Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), applauded the board's latest actions, saying they were long overdue.
"It's about time that the Board of Supervisors faced up to their responsibility, and has chosen to take appropriate action, albeit unpopular," he said. "There's no expert in the area of public healthcare worth his or her salt who would deny that Martin Luther King hospital was in need of radical intervention."
Finally - think I'm being melodramatic? Think that the Supes did what they had to, and that King/Drew's trauma unit will reopen healthier and wiser in just a few months, and that the other two major ERs can handle the load?
Put yourself in the shoes of 15-year-old kid dumped in ignorance, bullet in the head left to die on an empty sidewalk:
Bryan Hubbard, a King/Drew trauma surgeon, said he expected that many patients would show up at the hospital not realizing the trauma center had been closed, particularly patients brought by what police and some doctors refer to as "homeboy ambulances."
The term refers to a practice common among gang members. Either because they are fearful of the authorities or trying to act quickly, they will often drive wounded members of their gangs to hospitals themselves instead of calling an ambulance.
Call your own L.A. County Supervisors, email 'em. Let them know what you think of this callous decision.
