Patricia Nazario
March 21, 2008
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A new report looks at how nine private hospitals near King/Harbor Medical Center are functioning since that county-run facility closed last August. Downey Regional Medical Center is on that list. Not long ago, KPCC's Patricia Nazario toured its emergency room.
Robert Fuller: This is the board, how we manage the patients. You can see we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 patients here waiting for a bed upstairs.
Patricia Nazario: Robert Fuller is the numbers guy at Downey Regional Medical Center. Along with balancing the books, the chief operating officer has added counting patients to his duties.
Fuller: 'Cause I've got a different overflow area where I'm holding eight more. That means I'm holding 19 patients altogether for upstairs.
Nazario: A trial lawyer by trade, five years ago Fuller hung up his designer suits and took over the dwindling finances, and expanding patient population, at this private non-profit hospital.
Fuller: This is, you know, where the TV stuff happens. You know, where the operations occur.
And like a trauma surgeon, he's had to think on his feet to make the operation successful. He says Downey Medical Center's facing a $9 million deficit while its average occupation has jumped from 110 to 150 patients a day.
Fuller: We don't have any capital, so we're not gonna build anything right this second, so I've got to use what I've got. The patients show up and under federal law, we have to see them.
Nazario: The sickest of them in the emergency room get a room upstairs. More patients than before need intense care when they show up. Fuller says his staff commonly treats advanced diabetes, renal failure and strokes.
Nazario: And this has been since the closure of MLK?
Fuller: Well actually, it started with the downsizing of MLK. When MLK went from a hundred and some beds to 42, that's when we started seeing a lot. And then it accelerated once it was closed. But, it definitely started in the summer of 2006. And then it started huge in August 2007 when the closure actually happened.
Jim Lott: We found that while in the rest of the state, hospital admissions were going down, the hospitals serving the King/Harbor area were actuallygoing up. Particularly those hospitals that are private.
Nazario: Jim Lott is the spokesman for the Southern California Hospital Association. The organization represents most of the hospitals in the region. Its six page internal report, complete with tables and graphs, chronicles the extreme patient demand Lott says his members face.
Lott: So it means longer wait times, it means overcrowding at those hospitals. It means that those hospitals are not always available to receive ambulances, because they're way, way overstressed.
Nazario: How much of this can be turned around if Los Angeles county supervisors reopen King/Harbor by this fall, as planned?
Lott: If they were to build King/Harbor back to its normal status with a new operator, that could provide significant relief for those other hospitals that've been picking up the slack.
Nazario: The potential relief could be a year and a half away. It'll take at least that long for King/Harbor's new operators to obtain a new license for that hospital.
Mark Sauter: I'm trying to do something to make us as efficient and effective as I can.
Nazario: Downey Fire Chief Mark Sauter says time is of essence. Since last fall, his paramedics spend an average of 45 minutes waiting with patients at emergency rooms for beds to open up. The typical wait time used to be 20 minutes. In response, Sauter and the Downey Regional Medical Center have launched a communications network. It helps paramedics find out before they arrive how busy the hospital's emergency room is. The goal is to stop ambulances from showing up with patients the medical staff can't receive in a timely way.
Sauter: There's 14 Blackberries in our system now. Fuller wrote the check for that.
Nazario: That was a $10,000 check. In the Downey emergency room, a nurse figures out where to refer a walk-in patient.
[Nurse speaking with patient]
Nazario: Hospital executive Robert Fuller says he can't afford to wait for the L.A, County Board of Supervisors to ease the financial squeeze on his emergency room.
Fuller: We're not looking to close it. We had to tell people, it's really that serious. We are on the brink of just running out of all resources and closing down entirely, unless we get some help.
Nazario: And it's situations like this have inspired Southern California's main hospital association to expand its scope and survey all of L.A. County's 73 hospitals. The organization expects to issue that report within 30 days.
