In an effort to ensure hospitals properly discharge their patients, a new California state Senate bill, SB 275, would make it a misdemeanor offense for hospitals to discharge patients to a location other than his or her home without the patient’s consent.
Christy Wolfe, communications director for state Sen. Gil Cedillo’s office, said though the bill has been supported by many in the state senate, it has also met with opposition from groups such as the California Hospital Association.
Cedillo represents the 22nd Congressional District, which includes the Los Angeles district and its downtown district and Skid Row, where homeless patients have often been discharged, Wolfe said.
If the bill were to become a law, on the first violation the hospital would be given an administrative penalty of up to $100,000 from the California Department of Public Health.
After a second violation, there would be a civil penalty of $250,000 against the hospital, and on its third offense, a hospital would be guilty of a misdemeanor crime punishable by no less than $500,000.
The final version of the bill was amended July 2 and has been approved by both the Senate and the Assembly and is currently heading to the governor’s desk, Wolfe said.
She said the senator proposed the bill and introduced the legislation, which is the first of its kind, last January at the start of the legislative session.
“There is not a current specific law making it a misdemeanor offense to dump a homeless person,” Wolfe said.
But Regina Presa, acting director of Care Coordination at the UCLA Medical Center, said a 2006 state Assembly bill called AB 2745 addressed the release of homeless patients in hospitals.
Presa said this proposed legislation required that each county survey each hospital in the county to determine the procedures followed by hospitals for discharge of the homeless, and also how many homeless patients were being treated in those hospitals.
“The bill requires each regional association in California to have a discharge planning policy and procedures in place by January 1, 2008,” she said.
The governor has until the second week of September to sign the bill, and if signed it would then become law the following January, Wolfe said.
Diane Morrison, director of clinical social work at the UCLA Medical Center, said she does not believe a change in the law would have an impact on UCLA, since the hospital had already implemented all the guidelines necessary for discharging homeless patients, such as ensuring that patients have medically safe housing upon discharge.
“Someone who has a relatively minor injury but needs to change their dressings needs a place where they can wash their hands, where they could store the bandages so they could stay clean,” she said. “If you don’t have that, even with something little it could become awful.”
Federal standards require that everyone who comes into an emergency room be assessed, treated and stabilized, she said.
“When a homeless person with no insurance or no source of payment comes in, he or she is treated just as anyone else with resources,” Morrison said.
“The question becomes once the person becomes stable and ready to be discharged ““ what then?”
Presa said she believes it is unfortunate that there needs to be such a requirement or law, but she understands why it is necessary.
“I would hope that as hospitals, there should be high moral standards,” she said.
But some hospital administrators are against the passing of the bill.
Wolfe said the California Hospital Association was among those that lobbied to remove the offense as a misdemeanor crime from the legislation.
“They felt the misdemeanor crime was too harsh, though just when this legislation was being debated in the state legislature, there were seven or eight incidents of dumping that had been reported on Skid Row.”
Wolfe said the bill originally proposed making homeless dumping a misdemeanor on the first occurrence, but to balance and compensate the hospital administration’s interests, it was amended to make it a misdemeanor on the third offense.