County Usc Medical Center

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.

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.

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.

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.

The honeymoon between the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and its health services director finally foundered Tuesday amid fears that a second county hospital could close. Dr. Bruce Chernof, who has headed the nation's second-largest public health system since December 2005, told the supervisors last week that the federal government would be citing Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for placing its emergency patients in "immediate jeopardy" because of overcrowding and long waits.

With the long-anticipated debut of the new Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center only months away, doctors and politicians are still sparring over scarce bed space, workers are trying to fix last-minute glitches, and contractors are struggling to incorporate new technologies. The shimmering new facility was made necessary by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It has been in the works for a decade, and was first expected to open by 2004, and then 2005 and then 2006.

Four weeks ago, Maria and Rafael Alarcon took their son, Jorge, to the hospital, worried that he had become psychotic. After months of odd behavior, he'd told his mother he was a lion. He tried to bite his father. Just having Jorge admitted to the County-USC Medical Center mental hospital in Rosemead brought his family a measure of relief. "My daughter said, 'Bueno. He's there. He's protected. He's safe,' " said Maria Alarcon of Pasadena..

Earlier this week, the dean at USC's Keck School of Medicine warned of an "impending patient safety crisis" at the new County-USC Medical Center set to open next month, telling Los Angeles County supervisors in a letter that he was concerned that the hospital "will not be able to operate safely with the current staffing available." On Thursday, however, the dean, Dr. Carmen A.

For months, officials at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center have been buzzing with excitement about the anticipated opening of their new home. But that opening has been delayed repeatedly, most recently last week. Officials announced that the move to the new facility would be postponed from Oct. 17 to Nov. 7, citing challenging schedules for the hospital and state inspectors, as well as last-minute work not yet completed by sub-contractors. Two main concerns loom over the $1.

Many people who have worked at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center can tell tales about the countless souls plucked, Lazarus-like, from death. A veteran security guard can recall a man who leaped from a ledge of the building in a suicide attempt and crashed through a skylight, only to land on a gurney in the emergency room, where doctors saved him. My stories are different.