Methodist Hospital

Prosecutors filed civil complaints on Tuesday accusing two hospitals and a transportation services firm of dumping homeless patients in downtown Los Angeles, including one highly publicized case in which a paraplegic man wearing a colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter near a skid row park in February. The complaints by the L.A.

The case of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins, who were reportedly given 1,000 times the intended dosage of a blood thinner at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, underscores one of the biggest problems facing the healthcare industry: medication errors. At least 1.5 million Americans a year are injured after receiving the wrong medication or the incorrect dose, according to the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies of Science. Such incidents have more than doubled in the last decade.

Lena Nelson had looked forward to buying dolls and other presents for her first granddaughter, who was born prematurely last week. Instead, she was planning Monday for the girl's funeral. D'myia Sabrina Nelson and another premature baby girl, Emmery Miller, died Saturday after they received an adult dose of a blood thinner at Methodist Hospital. Four other babies were given overdoses of the drug.

The grandmother of a third premature infant who died after being accidentally given an adult-size dose of blood-thinning medication at a hospital said Wednesday that she prayed other families would not go through what she had because it was hard "to sit there and watch my granddaughter die." The baby girl, Thursday Dawn Jeffers, died late Tuesday at Riley Hospital for Children five days after she was born at Methodist Hospital.

Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte is shutting down its emergency room and acute-care facility today, closures that officials blame in part on the state's nursing shortage. The hospital's 177-bed skilled nursing facility, outpatient surgery center and fertility clinic will remain open, said Sister Michelle Clines, chairwoman of the hospital's board of directors. The hospital had slowly cut back on its acute-care beds, from a high of 150 in 1987 to fewer than 40 last year.

Methodist Hospital officials said a woman brought her newborn baby to the emergency room Monday, telling the staff she couldn't take care of him. The baby was the third to be legally abandoned in Sacramento since a safe haven law took effect in January 2001. The law tries to prevent newborns from being abandoned where they can die of exposure or starvation.

Asking for forgiveness, self-described "Angel of Death" Efren Saldivar was sentenced to life in prison without parole Wednesday, even as a judge unsealed a second confession in which the defendant said he killed considerably more than 100 Glendale hospital patients with injections of paralyzing drugs, more than twice the number he had admitted to previously. In the Jan.

Walter Rinehart Hoefflin Jr., an innovative administrator who spearheaded the mid-1950s move of Methodist Hospital from downtown Los Angeles to Arcadia and developed it into a major medical facility, has died. He was 87. Hoefflin, who also was president of Pasadena's Tournament of Roses in 1964-65, died Feb. 24 in San Marino.

Dr. James S. West, 85, former president of the California Society of Anesthesiologists and chief of staff at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, died April 23 of a rare blood disease and cardiac complications at UCLA Medical Center. Born in Salt Lake City, West was the great-grandson of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young.

A cheerful and joking former President Bush left a Florida hospital Friday for one in Houston after spending the night for treatment of an irregular heartbeat. Bush, 75, called his condition "much ado about not much." He had complained about lightheadedness at a photo opportunity in Naples, Fla., Thursday afternoon. He spent the night at Naples Community Hospital, then flew to Houston around midday before checking into Methodist Hospital here for more tests.