LA County supervisors approve pact with university to restore hospital services to inner city
By APTuesday, December 1, 2009
LA County approves public hospital pact with UC
LOS ANGELES — County supervisors on Tuesday approved a deal to create a new Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center on the site of an aging inner-city hospital that closed in 2007 after patient deaths blamed on shoddy care.
The Board of Supervisors unanimously ratified an agreement with the University of California to reopen a hospital to serve hundreds of thousands of people in the Watts-Willowbrook area, low-income communities in the South Los Angeles region.
However, reopening the hospital “is not a matter that exclusively benefits one community,” said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. “This is effectively a reinforcement, (an) undergirding of the county’s safety net.”
The plan is for a nonprofit, 120-bed facility to open in late 2012, followed by an emergency department the next year and an ambulatory care center in 2014.
While agreement details and costs remain to be worked out, the county is expected to cover construction costs that could run well over $300 million. The University of California, whose regents approved a “key-elements” agreement on Nov. 19, would provide the doctors and run a medical training program.
A nonprofit organization overseen by an independent board would run the hospital under a county lease.
The original county-run hospital, built after the 1965 Watts riot, was closed in 2007 after repeatedly failing federal inspections that exposed life-threatening problems.
Only a county walk-in clinic still operates there.
The hospital, known as King-Drew and later as King-Harbor, came under intense scrutiny when a woman with a perforated bowel died in May 2007 after lying in pain on the floor of the emergency room as staff ignored her.
The county made repeated efforts to improve the hospital. New management was brought in, the number of inpatient beds was reduced and the emergency room was closed.
Since the closure, local hospitals have been flooded with the estimated 50,000 patients a year who used to visit King’s emergency room.
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December 2, 2009: 4:21 pm
I’ll be keeping an eye on the Board of Supervisors in the coming weeks. I’m so glad to see they are cooperating with UC to re-open the hospital. They’ve really been taking some positive steps lately to improve quality of life in LA County. It also appears that budget reform a topic of high importance to them, too. Recently, they reissued an RFP for vendor services to operate the county’s GAIN case management services (a welfare-to-work program). I expect the same two companies will submit proposals as last year – incumbent Maximus Inc. and newcomer Policy Studies Inc. (PSI). Maximus has maintained its contract with the county for many years now, but its cost to the taxpayers keeps skyrocketing. If the new bids resemble those from last year, we can expect that the Maximus bid will cost taxpayers almost a million dollars more than PSI’s. What’s more, Maximus has a track record of poor performance. Under its latest three year contract, Maximus has been cited repeatedly for failing to meet required goals in 5 of 8 categories (according to the LA Times). Last year, the Department of Public Social Services favored PSI based on scoring done on the two companies by a neutral third party. PSI scored 9,082 out of 9,616 possible points in the procurement process, whereas Maximus scored 7,824 of 9,616. PSI won by a 13% margin on technical score and also submitted the lowest bid, which was 6% cheaper. Even worse, Maximus has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to buy the support of the Board of Supervisors through lobbying and campaign donations. I, for one, am grateful that the BOS reissued the RFP and am confident they will select the right choice for LA. In these tough economic times, we need our local elected officials to scrutinize how every tax dollar is being spent and eliminate waste wherever possible. With the re-opening of the hospital and streamlined spending, the BOS is on the right track to restoring LA to its old glory. |
SoCal Skier