TUESDAY | July 8, 2008

A very dubious one-year anniversary is approaching—the forced closure of King-Harbor Hospital in August 2007. Reopening the hospital as soon as possible requires a thirst for bold ideas and a fundamental willingness to change the status quo. 

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is on the right track. Will the employee union follow? And will the county engage the best and brightest health care minds to develop a new governance structure for the hospital?

Promising signs are emerging from the Board of Supervisors. Ceding day-to-day control from the board to a new operator would allow a reopened King-Harbor to function “free from the burdens of weak management and substandard care,” according to Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy. A careful courting is underway for the University of California to fill that role which could be the best arrangement yet.

Running a hospital is enormously challenging in today’s economic climate—with skyrocketing costs and a growing number of uninsured patients. At the county level, Byzantine civil service rules that protect problem employees at the expense of everyone else only exacerbate the challenges. Any credible operator would refuse to inherit the civil service failures that doomed King-Harbor in the first place.

Those failures were on horrifying display last week with the leaked release of video showing multiple King-Harbor hospital staffers ignoring Edith Isabel Rodriguez as she lay dying on the emergency room floor in May 2007. And at the same time, other emergency room patients were desperately dialing 911 from inside the hospital.

The Los Angeles Times reported that at least 22 King-Harbor employees with significant disciplinary histories still work at the hospital or were simply transferred to other facilities. No one knows the exact number because a computer glitch destroyed the employment records used to track those problem employees.

The president of the union representing those workers said that it is wrong to blame the civil service system for lapses in county leadership. Certainly, there is enough blame to go around more than a few times. However, the board has taken a hard look at itself and now admits that it’s not the best hospital administrator. Now its time for the union leadership to do the same and admit that the “duck, cover and always defend” style of protecting the worst county workers is a stain on the very best - and downright deadly to the general public, as in the case of Ms. Rodriguez.

Finally, this is a ripe opportunity to engage the region’s leading health care minds to identify best practices from around the nation for a new approach to hospital governance as well as a strategic plan for health care delivery in South Los Angeles. There is a great example in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, where community, business and health care leaders collaborated with elected officials to save it from a fate similar to King-Harbor by collectively developing a new governance structure.

Just as the original King Hospital arose from the ashes of the 1965 Watts Riots, now is the opportunity for King-Harbor to rise again from years of gross mismanagement and neglect. It’s an opportunity for community stakeholders, including the L.A. Area Chamber to make a new commitment to the residents of South Los Angeles and rebuild a broken and important pillar of our regional health care system.

And that’s The Business Perspective. 

Gary L. Toebben
President & CEO
Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

The Business Perspective is a weekly opinion piece by Gary Toebben, President & CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, produced with the input of Samuel Garrison, Vice President of Public Policy.

by Gary Toebben, President & CEO, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

L.A. Business
THIS WEEK
View the latest issue of the Chamber's weekly e-mail newsletter.
Contact us to subscribe.