Under withering criticism, Los Angeles County health officials acknowledged Tuesday that they had not used a key database intended to track and weed out problem employees from Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital for nearly a year.
John Schunhoff, interim Health Services Department director, told the Board of Supervisors that at least some employees had been fired or disciplined since the hospital closed its inpatient and emergency services in August and sent many of its workers to other county facilities. But since then, top managers have been unable to track the employees' locations and their subsequent performance and disciplinary status.
Schunhoff also acknowledged that at least one disciplined King-Harbor staffer -- found to have fallen asleep while watching a heart monitor in 2005 -- has since been promoted.
"The department was not serious about really doing anything about the problem employees," said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.
He was joined by his four colleagues in a public chiding of the department after The Times last week reported that seriously disciplined employees continued to work.
"It did not have a sense of urgency about it. . . . I feel burned by it," Yaroslavsky said.
The supervisors' statements came after years of broken promises by them to root out the malaise and neglect that figured prominently in federal regulators' decision last year to pull funding after finding that the hospital failed to meet minimum standards for patient care.
"It wasn't the department that was criticized or penalized as a governing board. It was ourselves," Supervisor Gloria Molina said. "We were dinged by [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] as an irresponsible governing board . . . because we empowered the department."
Once the hospital closed, except for some outpatient clinics, and its workers were reassigned, officials promised to keep tabs on employees who had been disciplined for serious lapses.
But they said that the database tracking employees from King-Harbor hospital, previously named King-Drew, went dormant after it was transferred in early 2007 from the county's Human Resources Department to the Health Services Department. It was corrupted sometime after the transfer, and no one noticed until The Times requested it in recent weeks.
Schunhoff said that county technicians resurrected the database Monday and learned that the last time it was accessed was in August.
