Born out of the Watts Riots in 1972, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Central Los Angeles was the premier medical facility in the low-income neighborhood until its closure in 2007 amid tales of medical mistakes, mismanagement and dangerous health conditions.
In an area already short of doctors, where chronic disease rates are high and few people have insurance, early hopes were that a replacement facility might be built by 2010. That target date was moved to 2012 and has now been pushed to 2014.
The new facility, built by Los Angeles County but to be run by an independent non-profit organization, will have 131 beds, instead of the old hospital’s 233. It won’t have a trauma center, but, despite fears that the new hospital would be a glorified clinic, it has an ER, surgery suites, intensive care, maternity areas, radiology, and other critical features.
When the design for a new medical center was approved in 2009, there was one hospital bed for every 1,000 people in the area. The national average was three beds for every 1,000 people. The Los Angeles Times reported that the area had more deaths from lung cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart disease than any other place in Los Angeles County. Diabetes rates were 44% higher, hypertension rates were 24% higher, HIV/AIDS rates were 38% higher and asthma rates were 11% higher.
Around 45,000 people used the hospital’s emergency room, and since the hospital’s closure patients have been redirected to other medical centers miles away. Some people don’t bother with the trip. When federal officials finally withdrew critical funding from the hospital and forced its closure, it was the 15th general acute-care facility to close in the county over a seven-year period. Nearly half of them were in the county’s poorer southern region.
The Times called the King/Drew neighborhood “among the most medically disadvantaged communities in the nation” and won a Pulitzer Prize for stories in 2004 detailing its woeful state with headlines like “How Whole Departments Fail a Hospital’s Patients.”
As the series pointed out, the hospital had dire problems for more than a decade—providing its patients with the worst health care in the county—before it was shut down. Now, the community has been without even that meager level of care for five years.
–Ken Broder
To Learn More:
South L.A. Frustrated by Delays in Building New King Hospital (by Anna Gorman, Los Angeles Times)
The Promise of Good Medical Care Returns to South Los Angeles (by Merdies Hayes, Our Weekly)
Plan Could Lead to Reopening of King Hospital (by Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times)
Closing Martin Luther King Hospital (by Celeste Fremon, LA Weekly)