Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, which was placed under the control of a UCLA-affiliated hospital last year in an attempt to improve its quality of care, failed a final federal inspection and will close its doors within the next two weeks, county officials announced last week.
The South L.A. hospital failed a “make-or-break” patient care inspection in July, and as a result King-Harbor hospital lost nearly $200 million in annual federal funding, a sum that represents nearly half its yearly budget.
Last Monday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors announced that it would close the hospital indefinitely.
While UCLA officials said they did not expect major ramifications for the university or its hospitals, the closure does jeopardize the future of a joint education program UCLA has had with the hospital.
The hospital has come under fire for its patient-care quality numerous times over the last decade, but county officials first began talking seriously of shutting it down last September, when King-Harbor failed a similar make-or-break inspection.
That time, the federal government agreed to postpone revoking the hospital’s funding, provided the county devised a plan to fix King-Harbor’s problems.
The county opted to cut down the hospital’s services and transfer management of it to Harbor-UCLA, a highly regarded medical center in Torrance.
But less than a year after that decision, federal inspectors have found that the quality of King-Harbor’s care is still severely lacking and the management transfer was not sufficient to bring the hospital up to snuff.
“(The county) did not fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the problems at that hospital,” said Carol Kim, health deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “At the end of the day, I don’t think any of us realized that all our efforts just weren’t wide enough and fast enough.”
UCLA officials did not return calls for comment on the county’s decision, but the fate of a residency program the university had with the hospital remains up in the air.
For years, UCLA had a joint medical education program with Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, which used to comanage King-Harbor. UCLA medical students enrolled in the program would spend two years taking classes at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and two years working in the South L.A. hospital.
The program was especially aimed at medical students who hoped to work in underserved communities.
When Harbor-UCLA took over management of the hospital, UCLA residents doing rotations at King-Harbor were moved to other hospitals, and no UCLA students remain at the hospital.
But with no timeline set for King-Harbor to reopen, the future of the residency program looks uncertain.
In July, Gerald Levey, dean of the School of Medicine, said he believed the loss of the program would be a significant blow.
“UCLA medical students who want to practice in inner-city areas train for two years at (King-Harbor), and there’s no way the students can learn with the troubles that have beset the hospital,” he said.
The university may feel the effects of the closure of King-Harbor in other ways, namely increased patient traffic through its hospitals as patients are diverted from King-Harbor.
King-Harbor’s urgent care services will remain open, as will a number of its outpatient clinics, but all its inpatient services will be closed, and people seeking help will be rerouted to other area hospitals.
Levey said in July he did not expect UCLA’s Westwood hospital to see significant increases in traffic, but other university-affiliated hospitals such as Harbor-UCLA may have to absorb more patients.
The closure will affect nine area hospitals, said Michael Wilson, director of communications for the county’s Department of Health Services.
The county is providing over $16 million in additional funds for those hospitals to help them absorb emergency room traffic diverted from King-Harbor.
“The department is working closely with those hospitals to make that transition go as smoothly as possible,” Wilson said. “We’re continuing to monitor the situation.”
While the new funding is intended to solve short-term problems stemming from the closing of King-Harbor, both Wilson and Kim stressed that the county is looking for ways to reopen the hospital in the future.
“The focus remains on trying to reopen the hospital just as soon as possible,” Wilson said. “(Closing it) certainly isn’t the decision we wanted, and the community there has critical needs.”
Kim noted that the decision to shut down King-Harbor has ramifications for the L.A. community outside South Central as well.
“Any hospital closure is not optimal, not just for the community, but for the entire (emergency medical services) system of Los Angeles County. It has a ripple effect (on hospitals with emergency rooms). But especially in an area of such high need ““ there are a high number of uninsured, with low access to care,” she said.
Kim added that the board of supervisors was looking into having a private care provider operate the hospital, as a way to reopen King-Harbor while simultaneously bringing up care quality.
Currently, county officials have set no date by which they hope to reopen the hospital, and Wilson said he expects it will take at least a year.