LAT: Deadly errors and politics betray a hospital's promise (King/Drew)

[NNguyenMD]

First of Five Parts (King/Drew Medical Center serves Watts, Sougate, and Compton in the LA Area)

Deadly errors and politics betray a hospital's promise

By Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein and Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writers

The investigation reveals that King/Drew is much more dangerous than the public has been told.

Among the findings:

• Errors and neglect by King/Drew's staff have repeatedly injured or killed patients over more than a decade, a pattern that remains largely unscrutinized and unchecked. Some lapses were never reported to authorities — or even to the victims or their families. And some people learned of the severity of the failings only by suing or, in several instances, from Times reporters who sought them out to learn about their care.

• Although King/Drew opened in 1972 with the promise that it would be "the very best hospital in America," it is now, by various measures, one of the very worst. It pays out more per patient for medical malpractice than any of the state's 17 other public hospitals or the six University of California medical centers.

• Entire departments are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality. Employees have pilfered and sometimes sold the hospital's drugs; chronic absenteeism is rampant; assaults between hospital workers are not uncommon. Despite King/Drew's repeated promises to regulators, the problems have gone unfixed for years.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kdday1dec05,0,4541490.story?coll=la-home-headlines (free supscription required)

[NNguyenMD]

1. Racial politics played at its worst,

Reading this almost made me feel ashamed for being in the healthcare field, and for having grown up not too far away from there in the SoCal area.

My god, this place is an absolute abomination, I seriously can't fathom why a civil rights community would invest an iota of energy to keeping such a horrible place open.

Be sure to also catch Part 2 of this story also at the LA times website and others for the rest of this week.

[mountebank]

2. Sadly all too common - I was on a malpractice jury this year....

I just read the article this morning myself. Great investigative reporting by the L.A. Times. Well, one can understand, after reading the article, the various reasons why community members have defended and continue to defend the hospital. But there comes a time when enough is enough.

Incidentally, in January I served on a jury for a medical malpractice case against L.A. County-USC hospital, one that the article cites as having its own problems. I can vouch for that. The plaintiff/patient fell through the cracks of the system through disorganization and neglect. We awarded him about a million dollars to take care of him for the rest of his life (he was young and would require meds and in-house care). I thought we came to a just verdict.

[mountebank]

3. BTW: if you want to read the article, and don't want to subscribe...

go to www.bugmenot.com and you can get a username and password in seconds.

[mountebank]

4. Kick - good morning Los Angeles!