County Usc Medical Center

Los Angeles County health officials want to replace the venerable but decaying Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center with two new hospitals, one on the current site and a second, smaller facility in the San Gabriel Valley. The formal recommendation, which would cost an estimated $1.8 billion if implemented, is being reviewed by the county's chief administrative officer. It calls for the project to be financed through a series of bond measures beginning in 1992.

Faced with severe overcrowding and emergency room wait times that average 12 hours, Los Angeles County officials are considering adding 150 more beds to County/USC Medical Center. The county opened a new state-of-the-art hospital in 2008 to replace an aging general hospital tower. But even before the doors opened, officials worried that it wouldn't be big enough. The new hospital has 600 inpatient beds, 224 fewer than its predecessor. It didn't take long for the problem to become apparent.

County-USC Medical Center plans to displace 240 families east of its Boyle Heights campus as part of a $1-billion expansion and construction project that will eventually replace the 1930s-era General Hospital. The eight-year project, which is scheduled to begin next year, will consolidate the four hospitals on the site into one large building and reduce the number of total beds from 1,400 to 950.

It was billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. " The highest bidder in an online charity auction would get his name on a plaque next to a dazzling new Shepard Fairey mural at a Los Angeles hospital, a meeting with the celebrated artist and VIP status at an unveiling ceremony. A year and a half later, Fairey's work adorns the children's wing of L.A. County-USC Medical Center, but the name of the man who won the auction appears only on a lawsuit demanding his money back. It's an unseemly legal dispute pitting one of young Hollywood's favorite charities against an entertainment industry entrepreneur and reality television figure.

Los Angeles County can only afford to build a dramatically scaled-down 350-bed replacement for County-USC Medical Center with $410 million that the federal government has promised for the nation's busiest public hospital. Any new medical center larger than that would require the financially strapped county to borrow heavily to finance construction, Health Services Director Mark Finucane told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

Al Juarez, 52, cruises through the streets of Marengo Terrace, but the neighborhood he sees is one that is no longer there. Marengo Heights Elementary School. St. Camillus Catholic Church. And Brittania Street, which used to run north from Marengo Street and lined with homes up the hill. The memories are there, but much of Juarez's neighborhood is long gone, eroded bit by bit as County-USC Medical Center has grown to meet the needs of the county's poor.

In a case that raises deep concerns about physician responsibility in today's public hospitals, a former resident at County-USC Medical Center has told lawyers that a senior surgeon left the operating room early when it might have been possible to save the life of a 65-year-old patient who bled to death. Dr.

Excessive force by sheriff's deputies probably contributed to a prisoner's death last month in the jail ward of County-USC Medical Center, two nurses who work in the facility charged Saturday. "I think (deputies) were responsible for his death," William Strachan, a nurse who was among witnesses to the incident, said in an interview. "I think they used excessive and unnecessary force, which caused his death," Johnnie Blue, the other nurse said.

Here's a riddle: What do the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center have to do with one another? Answer: Not much, except in the byzantine world of Capitol politics. Some Los Angeles-area legislators are trying to seize control of the Coliseum from the county and city of Los Angeles by establishing a state commission that would oversee all operations in the state-owned Exposition Park.

Citing a wide range of deficiencies in fire safety and the ability to monitor the quality of medical care, the nation's major hospital review organization has placed Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center on conditional accreditation. This is the second major county hospital to be placed on conditional accreditation. Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center was placed on the same probationary status earlier this year.

Only 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Haydee Ibarra's doctors told her that her baby wasn't getting the blood and oxygen she needed to survive. If she stayed inside the womb, the baby would certainly die. If she was born, her chances weren't much better and she could face a lifetime of health complications. Ibarra, 22, and Yovani Guido, 24, implored the doctors to do everything possible to save their daughter. And they did. PHOTOS: The third smallest baby on record On Aug. 30, Melinda Guido was born four months premature at Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center.

A wall-mounted computer screen in the call center at L.A. County/USC Medical Center showed the emergency room was full. Ambulances were supposed to take patients elsewhere on this Friday night. But they kept coming — some because it was the closest ER, others because the injuries were so severe only a trauma center could handle them. "We get them from outside hospitals, from clinics, from the field, from the jail, from police, from everywhere — everywhere," said Alma Aviles, a nurse supervisor.

State public health officials have fined 12 California hospitals for medical errors that hurt or killed patients, according to a report released Wednesday. Three of the hospitals — L.A. County/USC Medical Center, Torrance Memorial Medical Center and Brotman Medical Center — are in Los Angeles County. The penalties were issued for errors such as leaving foreign objects in patients' bodies during surgery and administrating the wrong medication. They occurred in 2009 and 2010.

Dr. Max Harry Weil, an influential pioneer of critical-care medicine and the founding president of the Weil Institute of Critical Care Medicine in Rancho Mirage, has died. He was 84. Weil died of prostate cancer July 29 at his home in Rancho Mirage, said his daughter, Dr. Susan Weil. The Swiss-born Weil was known as one of the world's leading clinicians, educators and researchers in critical-care medicine, a multidisciplinary specialty dealing with the care and treatment of the most acutely ill and injured patients.

Overcrowding persists at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center's emergency room, but hospital officials have improved how they manage the crowds, decreasing patient wait times and the number of patients who leave without being seen, according to county officials. The average wait time decreased from 11 hours and 10 minutes in September to 10 hours and 20 minutes in October, county health officials wrote in a report submitted Tuesday to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Overcrowding remains a persistent problem at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center's emergency room even as conditions deemed dangerous have eased in the last two months, county officials said Tuesday. "Dangerously" overcrowded conditions in the 600-bed hospital's emergency room decreased to an average of about five hours a day in October, down from a high of 16 hours a day in August, county health officials told supervisors Tuesday. Carol Meyer, the county health services department's chief network officer, said over the last two months the hospital built a "rapid early medical evaluation" area in the emergency room so that every patient sees a doctor or nurse within an hour of arrival, similar to a system in place for about two years at the county's Harbor- UCLA Medical Center emergency room.

Thursday was a day like any other at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. Twenty-three babies were born, and one patient died. It was hot, and so windows were thrown open in the wards where patients sleep five to a room. At County-USC, this is called air conditioning. Neonatal specialists kept close watch through incubator glass on a tiny, wriggling red form, a premature baby who weighed less than a pound.

The legendary County-USC Medical Center, one of the nation's busiest and most storied hospitals, would be closed and 10,000 jobs would be eliminated as part of a new county budget-balancing plan that surfaced Thursday.

Even before the doors opened on the $1.02-billion Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center many observers warned that the new hospital was too small. Now, more than a year and a half of experience appears to confirm it. The overcrowding has become so intense that health officials asked county Supervisor Gloria Molina eight months ago what she would think if the hospital began placing patients in the hallways, the supervisor recalled in an interview. "I said, 'Absolutely not. We will not have patients in the hallway,' " Molina said.