Patients being moved to the new, improved -- smaller -- County-USC
The new facility, which serves some of L.A. County's neediest patients, has better equipment and more private rooms. But critics focus on its 25% fewer beds.
For three-quarters of a century, the county's flagship public hospital called a cavernous Depression-era building home. Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center was drab, with few windows. Most wards housed six patients to a room, few were air-conditioned.
At the end of a two-day move that should be completed by tonight, the county's neediest patients instead will be cared for in a $1.02-billion state-of-the-art facility.
On Friday, the courtyard between the old and new facilities bustled with staffers pushing carts filled with forms and linens. On State Street, ambulances ferried patients to the new building.
Equipment there is generations ahead of the old hospital. Ninety percent of the rooms are designed for just one patient, each equipped with a flat-screen TV and phone. Automated carts -- used only one other place in the nation -- ferry linens, meals and waste through a dedicated hallway without a human porter.
But for all the bells and whistles, skeptics worry a more basic commodity falls short: beds. The old hospital, located two miles east of downtown Los Angeles, could admit as many as 824 patients. The new facility has a maximum capacity of 600 beds, a drop of more than 25% and one that has some advocates for the poor worried.
Already, county health officials have had to open up overflow space for about 45 patients at a facility in Downey, 14 miles away.
The decision to downscale the new County-USC was made by county supervisors in 1997 amid concerns that a larger facility would be too costly to build and run.
Since then, 14 emergency rooms have shut down, including the one at long-beleaguered Martin Luther King, Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Willowbrook, south of Watts.
"The county has reduced its capacity and continues to do so, not based upon the needs of the population, but upon its own budgetary constraints. Sooner or later, we may see a serious problem," said Dr. Brian Johnston, medical director of the emergency department at White Memorial Medical Center, a mile south of County-USC. "The private sector and public hospitals are interdependent, and if they can't carry the load, then it falls to us."
Johnston and others say the first major test of the smaller hospital will be the coming flu season. The key may lie in how much more efficient the new facility proves to be -- something staff and observers hope will compensate for fewer beds.
