When I lived in Compton it was common to hear horror stories of what went on at the city hospital, Martin Luther King Jr. hospital in Los Angeles. This was the go to hospital for families in Compton, Watts, and parts of LA, all areas with a very high concentration of gang violence. Many in the community, including myself, have lost friends and/or family in this hospital and the horror stories were so bad - the wrong leg getting amputated, involuntary euthanasia, and others - that the hospital was referred to as ‘Killer King’.

Well now, it seems those horror stories have come back to haunt the hospital, the LA Times reports:

King/Drew Fails Final U.S. Test
The hospital will lose all federal money by year’s end, throwing its fate in doubt. Supervisors will hold an emergency meeting Monday.

Federal regulators notified Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center late Friday that it had failed what was billed as a “make or break” inspection and would lose annual funding of about $200 million — more than half the hospital’s budget — at the end of the year.

The move is likely to force Los Angeles County to close the long-troubled public hospital, give it to someone else to run or turn it into a clinic, as officials have repeatedly acknowledged.

During a lengthy meeting, federal inspectors told King/Drew officials that the hospital still did not meet minimum patient-care standards.

King/Drew has been out of compliance with federal guidelines since January 2004, when it was first cited for serious lapses in care that had injured and killed patients.

During the latest inspection, the hospital failed nine of the government’s 23 conditions for federal funding, according to a letter from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that was hand-delivered Friday to King/Drew’s administrator.

Federal regulators identified problems in nursing, pharmacy, infection control, surgical services, rehabilitation services, quality control, patients’ rights and the hospital’s governing body and physical plant.

In fact, inspectors found more problems in the supposedly reformed King/Drew than they had at any time in the last three years. Some of the life-threatening lapses cited were nearly identical to those found in the past.

For instance, the letter said, “there were no appropriately trained and competent staff, on the 3E unit, assigned to watch the heart monitors of seriously ill patients who required cardiorespiratory monitoring. This is especially troublesome, because previously documented cases showed that patients died when nurses at King/Drew failed to heed heart monitor warnings.”

Staff members also admitted to inspectors that they had hit a patient’s morphine pump at least five times to deliver additional sedation, even though the device is intended only to be used by patients. The inspectors called this “a very unsafe practice that can lead to over-sedation, respiratory depression or even death,” the letter says.

“Termination of the Medicare provider agreement is final,” the letter states in underlined text….

he 252-bed hospital south of Watts is one of the few sources of acute healthcare for the uninsured in South Los Angeles, most of them African American or Latino. King/Drew has enormous symbolic value as well: It was created to remedy racial inequities in healthcare after the 1965 Watts riots and has long been a source of pride — and jobs — in the community.

King/Drew, the second smallest of the county’s four general hospitals, has 2,238 full-time employees and last year treated 11,000 inpatients and 167,000 outpatients.

The hospital has been beset by patient care lapses and other crises almost since it opened in 1972. But the last three years have been its most challenging. The latest crisis began in August 2003 when The Times reported that two women connected to cardiac monitors died after nurses failed to notice their vital signs deteriorating.

Since then, the newspaper and government inspectors have identified case after case in which patients have been harmed or killed because of serious lapses in care. The Medicare agency’s inspectors now have visited the hospital 15 times.

In December 2004, The Times ran a five-part series detailing how King/Drew was much more dangerous than the public knew. The newspaper found that, by a variety of measures, King/Drew was among the worst hospitals in the state, and even the nation.

The hospital’s failings did not stem from a lack of money, as its supporters long contended. King/Drew spent more per patient than any of the three other general hospitals run by Los Angeles County.

I hope this brings the community a much better hospital. The full article can be found here.