AP's reporting that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors went ahead and closed King/Drew Medical Center's Trauma Unit to help take pressure off the overloaded and deeply flawed administration of the main hospital.
And for what it's worth, the vote was 4-0 (Knabe, Antonovich, Molina, Yaroslavsky) to zero. Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke didn't even have the courage to vote against the measure that will surely result in the needless deaths of her own constituents. She abstained ...
AP says:
The crowd in the county Hall of Administration erupted into chants of "Save King-Drew" and "No justice, no peace" immediately after the vote.
"This is the first time since I've been on the board that there's been an honest, if not painful, discussion about what is going on at that hospital," said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a board member for nearly 10 years.
The county's health director, Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, recommended closing the trauma center so the hospital can focus on improving overall operations.
The hospital has been plagued by severe problems, including patient deaths blamed on poor nursing, lawsuits brought by patients who had medical objects left inside them and hospital mismanagement that has threatened its funding and accreditation.
The board also voted unanimously for an amendment that stated that its goal is to restore trauma services at the hospital.
Services at the trauma center will begin decreasing Dec. 1 and it should be completely closed by Feb. 1, Garthwaite said.
And here's a link to the likely-to-be-updated Times story.
Why does this matter to anyone outside of South Central?
Because every year it's closed, more than 2,000 people car-wreck manglees, hapless industrial-accident victims and soft targets of the knife and gun club will get packed into ambulances and sent to the already-swamped County/USC or even farther-flung Harbor/UCLA.
Because even if you don't much care that some of them will suffer or die because of this decision, you and I will wind up paying higher taxes to cover an increase in civil lawsuit judgments against the county.
Because it's immoral, bad policy and short-sighted:
The county just contracted with Navigant Consulting for $13.25 million to take over a revision of hospital operations that should put an end to the needless patient deaths. It doesn't show much faith in the consultant's abilities to proceed with this drastic stop-gap measure before Navigant's had a chance to do much assessment of the problems.
By the time you read this the L.A. County Board of Supervisors will have already begun the session in which it votes whether to shut down the King/Drew Medical Center's Trauma Unit.
Four of the five supervisors (Knabe, Antonovich, Molina, Yaroslavsky) have indicated they're going through with the plan to take pressure off the struggling hospital-reorganization work by ignoring the protests of several thousand South Central residents and politicians and celebs like Jesse Jackson, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and Steve Harvey.
Only Sup. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke - whose bread is buttered in South Central - has taken a stand against shutting down the trauma unit ...
Details on the Supes vote as they emerge.
Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - 08:56 AM
