This is Soooooo WRONG

[Carlene 12]

Paris Hilton was deemed too sick to stay in jail, yet this woman was allowed to DIE on the floor of a county hospital's ER.

LOS Angeles - An inner-city hospital is struggling to survive amid a new report of breakdowns in patient care, the replacement of its chief medical officer and an ultimatum to correct long-running problems or close.

Newly released tapes of 911 calls reveal that a woman who lay bleeding on the floor of the emergency room died last month after dispatchers refused to contact paramedics or an ambulance to take her to another facility.

The woman’s treatment was “callous, it was a horrible thing,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke said Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the county Board of Supervisors grilled health officials about conditions at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. It ordered them to return in two weeks with a plan to deal with a hospital shutdown if it is unable to correct deficiencies laid out in a federal inspection that concluded emergency room patients were in “immediate jeopardy.”

The federal review was based, in part, on a report that a man with a brain tumor waited four days in the emergency room when he needed to be transferred to another facility for lifesaving brain surgery.

Hospital given deadline

After the inspection last week, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave the hospital 23 days to correct problems or face a loss of federal funding. That could force it to close.

Burke said the county-run hospital is a crucial facility and that nearby hospitals could not handle its patient load.

“I can’t tell you whether it can be fixed but ... the community can not stand to lose another emergency room,” she said.

Dr. Roger Peeks, the hospital’s chief medical officer, was placed on “ordered absence” Monday and replaced on an interim basis by Dr. Robert Splawn, senior medical officer for the county health department. Department spokesman Michael Wilson confirmed the change but declined to elaborate Wednesday, saying it was a personnel matter.

Health officials are “doing everything in our power to help MLK-Harbor meet national standards,” Dr. Bruce Chernof, director of the health department, said in a statement.

In a report to the supervisors on Tuesday, Chernof said quality of care had improved but warned that there was no “roadmap” for what he called the most difficult effort to “reinvent a failing hospital” ever undertaken in the United States. The hospital has served “thousands of patients well and a few very poorly,” he said.

The hospital, formerly known as King-Drew, was built several years after the 1965 Watts riot to provide medical care in the South Los Angeles area. It has been cited more than a dozen times in 3½ years for inadequate care that has led to patient deaths and injuries

[gadgetlady 4]

Those of us in the greater Los Angeles area pretty much know to avoid this hospital (and a few others) like the plague. What's sad is those that aren't "in the know" or have no other option end up getting the short end of the stick. There's no excuse for it, but it's also not surprising. What a heartwrenching thing for the family :-(

[green 6]

You all know my take on the American health care system from other posts which I have made on this site. Up here in Soviet Canuckistan and over in there in European Common Marketstan we have universal health care. This is covered through the tax base and yet these health care countries save a minimum of $2,000 per capita per annum in health care costs. How do they/we do it? Well, they/we cut out the middleman/the businessman. This seems to save everyone in these countries 2 grand per head.

And these are healthy and market-driven economies!