Still pleading for a revival of South L.A. hospital - A handful of advocates turns out at a county hearing on the future of the King facility.

South Los Angeles activist Virginia Franklin wept before Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday, recalling how her mother, a psychiatric nursing professor, would bring her students to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center to train.

Holding her 5-month-old nephew Kelly, Franklin asked the four board members present, "When he wants to go to school, where's he going to do his internship?"

Another resident, Delana Sowell, 47, described how King/Drew doctors cared for her 1-year-old grandson stricken with a seizure. "They did all they could to save his life" -- and did, said Sowell.

Those flashes of emotion punctuated a muted public hearing on the future of the now-defunct and renamed Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. But the hearing was merely a legal formality 2 1/2 months after health officials closed the hospital indefinitely after it failed a critical federal inspection.

Compared with the packed 2004 hearing that preceded the closure of the hospital's trauma center -- a facility considered vital to the violence-prone surrounding neighborhoods -- Tuesday's gathering was subdued. Fewer than two dozen people testified, most of them health or legal advocates citing South L.A.'s high disease rates coupled with scarce medical services.

According to a new report funded by the California Endowment, south Los Angeles County has fewer hospital beds -- roughly 1 per 1,000 people -- than any other region of the county, and below the state average of two beds per 1,000 residents.

Health advocates pleaded with supervisors to allow for more community involvement in the effort to reopen King-Harbor and complained that scant publicity about Tuesday's hearing resulted in the small turnout. The people of South Los Angeles "have been exhausted by the battle" to save King-Harbor, said Tim Watkins, of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. "They're no longer able to come forward."

The Willowbrook hospital, long plagued by problems with patient care, still bustles with activity: Although the emergency room was shuttered, an urgent care center operates there 16 hours a day. Visits have been steadily rising since the August shutdown; 2,700 patients sought urgent and specialty care there during the week that ended Oct. 20. Nearly 200,000 visits to the urgent care center and dozens of specialty clinics are expected in the next year.