Board votes to keep King open
Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday backed off a threat to begin closing Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, opting instead to give the beleaguered facility a reprieve as it prepares for a last-chance government inspection next month.
The board shelved a motion that would have started the clock ticking toward shutting the facility near Willowbrook after its top healthcare officials warned the move could trigger a stampede of departing employees that would in turn undermine efforts to pass the federal survey.
Others decried the effects of a closure on patients and nearby hospitals, which have dealt with a string of emergency room closures over the last few years. King-Harbor is the only public hospital serving a large swath of South Los Angeles. It treated 47,000 emergency room patients last year.
Closing the hospital early is "a callous approach to people," said Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke, who represents the area and had been criticized for not speaking out in recent days. "Someone has to take a position that the people of Los Angeles County who are poor, who are uninsured, have medical care."
Rejecting a closure, supervisors asked the county's Department of Health Services to begin negotiating with other local hospitals to accept King-Harbor patients in the event that state or federal regulators force the facility to close. The state announced last week it had moved to revoke the hospital's license.
But the board's decision drew fire from some who said the panel had not taken a bold enough step to fix long-standing healthcare failures at the hospital.
Joe R. Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc. and a longtime civil rights activist, said shutting the hospital would allow the county to more quickly rebuild it with "professional, competent" staff.
"It's really unfortunate that they sort of stepped back from the brink here and let some other agency, the feds or someone else, take the heat for eventually moving to close this hospital," Hicks said. "What I think we're seeing here is a lack of courage in the face of an incredible problem."
King-Harbor, formerly known as Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, when it was affiliated with an adjacent medical school, has been out of compliance with the federal government's minimum patient care standards since 2004.
