Patients At Risk

Why is it that a county hospital that serves the minority
community in south Los Angeles can't seem to get it's
act together? Is it money? Nooooo cause the county
supervisors pumped millions of dollars into the facility
and it still flunked a federal inspection losing it's federal
funding. I think it's a number of things, mismanagement,
and low morale are a couple of the problems. Too
many patients and not enough staff are a couple more.
Feel free to weigh-in on this hospital crisis after you've
checked out the article below.

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital's recent woes, far from being isolated examples of poor care at a reformed institution, represent a continuing pattern of entrenched failings that risk patients' lives, according to a federal report released Monday. According to a June 7 report from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 17 patients, among 60 whose cases were reviewed, received substandard care at the hospital. Some were as recent as last month. Based on the findings, the Medicare agency declared that patients at King-Harbor in Willowbrook were in immediate jeopardy of harm or death.

The government gave the hospital, formerly known as King/Drew, 23 days to correct its problems or lose federal certification and funding once and for all. The hospital would probably be forced to close if funding were cut off. Among the cases cited:• One patient in King-Harbor's emergency room told a triage nurse on April 30 that he was seeing "aliens and devils" and that he was thinking about drinking bleach to commit suicide. He was left in the lobby for more than an hour and not seen by a physician for almost seven hours. A mental health evaluation was not completed for 17 hours after he arrived, according to the federal report.

At that time, the patient denied being suicidal and was discharged without receiving treatment.

• A female patient went to the emergency room on March 8 complaining of two weeks of stomach pain. She said she had nausea and rated her pain as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. "The patient identified that the pain she was experiencing was constant and that nothing provided relief." Even so, she was given no treatment to alleviate pain or reduce her fever. Two hours later, she was checked again and again offered no treatment. She was not seen by a physician until nearly seven hours after she arrived. "The patient experienced severe pain throughout her [emergency stay]," the report said. Eleven hours after she arrived, she went to surgery.





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