Harbor Ucla Medical Center

The head of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, who was overseeing the hospital's integration with the troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, will retire Feb. 9, the health department announced Monday. In November, Tecla Mickoseff was named interim chief executive officer of the plan to put King/Drew, in Willowbrook, under Harbor management.

Responding to escalating concerns about bacterial meningitis, Los Angeles County health officials announced Wednesday that they are offering free vaccines to low-income and uninsured residents. The vaccines protect against meningococcal meningitis , a respiratory disease that can be deadly if not diagnosed in time. The disease can be spread by close sneezing, coughing or kissing. The vaccines can be obtained at seven county clinics and hospitals  in Los Angeles County.

Wearing a white lab coat and darting from counter to counter, Nikhil Chanani used a dropper to transfer a clear, radioactive fluid from a large glass jar over a protective partition into a long tube. A small radio played classical music, but Chanani, 18, the valedictorian in June at West High School in Torrance, pointed out: "Mostly, I listen to KROQ, but this is easy to work to."

Earlier this year, Joane Austin rushed her elderly mother to the emergency room for fear she was having a heart attack. Austin normally would have made the short trip to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, the landmark hospital in South Los Angeles. But King/Drew has been closed for five years, so Austin drove several miles to the emergency room at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood. "I prayed all the lights would stay green," she said. "It was scary. " Once they arrived, doctors determined that Austin's mother needed emergency surgery to remove scar tissue around her intestines.

The man on his back on the operating table was awake while a four-foot-long, plastic-coated wire pierced an artery in his groin, coursed up that vessel through the torso, and then arced into the crown of arteries atop his throbbing heart. He was 47 years old, a retired builder without health insurance. Because he was locally anesthetized and lightly tranquilized, he could still understand Dr.

Jeanne Young has spent more than a decade feeding, treating and sterilizing dozens of feral cats that roam the grounds of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. But now, some of the cats that she and other center staffers have worked so hard to save could be rounded up, taken to animal shelters and put to death.

In the windowless emergency room at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, there is one way to tell the sun is rising. Doctors pick up their already frenetic pace as the sick, slouched in plastic chairs, nervously watch the clock. Patients like Jessica Short have to get to work. Short, 19, has no insurance and cannot afford to miss a single shift as an usher at the local multiplex. A doctor at a county clinic had told her she needed surgery to stop some bleeding.

A wall of bulletproof glass is now rising in the crowded emergency room waiting area at Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a stark symbol of the heightened safety concerns at local hospitals. The glass, which will divide throngs of waiting patients from the front-line nurses who attend them, is intended to shield health care workers from violence. Harbor-UCLA has also beefed up its emergency room security staff and plans to encircle its property with a chain-link fence.

A 40-year-old building just outside Torrance is on the verge of becoming Los Angeles County's latest political hot potato. The structure houses Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a 340-bed public hospital serving a vast uninsured population, as well as treating thousands of Angelenos who have health coverage.

The chief medical officer at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center may not have followed proper procedures for credentialing doctors at the hospital and is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, according to sources familiar with the inquiry. Gail V. Anderson Jr., who is also an associate dean at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, was placed on paid administrative leave from the county hospital earlier this week and was escorted out of his office. His locks were changed and his computer secured, sources said.

The former chief medical officer at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center has filed a $50-million lawsuit against two Los Angeles County health officials who he claimed conspired to leak news about his suspension to The Times and other media outlets. In August 2011, Dr. Gail V. Anderson Jr. was placed on paid administrative leave from the job he'd held for more than a dozen years. Soon after, The Times and The Daily Breeze published stories about what Anderson's suit called his "humiliating public expulsion," in which he was escorted out of the hospital.

The psychiatric emergency services at two county-run hospitals are so overcrowded that mentally ill patients have to sleep on mattresses on the floor, health officials acknowledged this week. The packed conditions at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center make it more difficult to de-escalate the emotions of patients who arrive at the hospital agitated and anxious, said Christina Ghaly, deputy director of strategic planning for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Harbor-UCLA Medical Center has failed to keep its operating rooms clean and safe and to protect its patients from possible infection, according to federal inspection reports recently released to The Times. Inspectors found rooms that had holes in the ceilings or that were dusty and cluttered. Operating rooms were kept at the wrong humidity level, which can lead to the spread of germs, the reports said. Hospital staff members also weren't washing their hands according to policy. "The hospital failed to maintain a sanitary environment for the provision of surgical services," the reports said.

The chief medical officer at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center may not have followed proper procedures for credentialing doctors at the hospital and is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, according to sources familiar with the inquiry. Gail V. Anderson Jr., who is also an associate dean at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, was placed on paid administrative leave from the county hospital earlier this week and was escorted out of his office. His locks were changed and his computer secured, sources said.

These days, the battle for economic justice is fought daily in a thousand obscure skirmishes in boardrooms and executive suites across the country. It's a conflict usually waged under the cover of smugly technocratic euphemisms such as outsourcing, right-sizing and resource rationalization. To the extent they're counted at all, the human casualties are reckoned as collateral damage. As early as Tuesday, one of those skirmishes may occur in the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration, where the Board of Supervisors will consider whether to outsource the janitorial work at its Olive View-UCLA and Harbor-UCLA medical centers to Sodexo, a multinational corporation based in France.

Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, one of the Los Angeles County health network's most heavily used facilities, is poised for a major expansion that planners hope will greatly relieve overcrowding. County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve the final piece of a $333-million plan to expand the Torrance facility's emergency department and renovate the surgical ward. The emergency room will grow from 25,000 square feet with 42 bays to 75,000 square feet with 80 bays, providing enhanced privacy.

Mitch Culp of Rowland Heights remained hospitalized at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center after suffering two broken vetebrae during a sprint-car time trial Saturday night at Ascot Park.

A surgical technician convicted of firing a gun into an occupied car was back on the job last week at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, just days after being released from jail, despite vows by Los Angeles County officials to crack down on medical personnel with criminal records. Norris Smith, 53, had spent 169 days behind bars before pleading no contest to the felony charge Aug. 26. In exchange for the plea, a five-year state prison sentence was suspended. He was placed on probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment and abstain from alcohol, according to court records.

Workers at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance quietly steamed Tuesday when they picked up the newspaper and learned that Los Angeles County supervisors use customized water bottles at taxpayer expense. Purified water -- delivered to the hospital in 3- and 5-gallon water tanks -- is a perk that workers found out in March would be taken away.