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King-Drew-Harbor Hospital To Shut Doors |
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Thursday, 16 August 2007 |
LOS ANGELES/ SAN BERNARDINO
Locals Touched by the Historic Hospital Express Grief, Anger and Relief
By Chris Levister
Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital
(formally King-Drew
Medical Center)
shut down its emergency room Friday night and will close entirely within two
weeks. The sobering news spread quickly throughout the Inland
Empire stoking an array of emotions from former patients, local
healthcare providers and physicians many of whom trained and labored at the
historic institution.
"I gave birth to my first child at King-Drew 33 years ago.
To see it close is like losing a member of the family."
For 67 year old Margaret Hayden of Fontana news of King-Drew's imminent closure
hit deep and hard. Pushing aside the hospital's long troubled history, Hayden
paused to remember the Martin
Luther King
Jr. General Hospital
that rose from the ashes of the 1965 Watts Riots.
"You could feel and
see the pride. So many Black doctors dressed in white rushing around
...nurses...our own people. We finally had a hospital of our own. It was a sight
to see. Black women came from all over to give birth at King," said Hayden who
grew up in Compton.
"It was a badge of honor to hold up your baby and say ‘She's a King baby.'
The hospital was a dream come true."
That dream, however has been suspended indefinitely. Los Angeles County officials moved to close the
hospital after federal regulators halted $200 million in annual funding for the
long troubled facility.
County leaders hope to resurrect the hospital under a
private provider, but that pledge did little to lift the somber mood among many
Inland African-American physicians, nurses health providers and former patients
touched by the hospital which in 1982 was renamed Martin Luther King, Jr.
/Charles R. Drew Medical Center, in honor of the great champion of equality and
freedom and the renowned African-American physician and medical researcher
credited with the invention of ‘blood banking'.
The tragic loss that's not being reported is the hospital's
internationally acclaimed physician staff and residency program which provided
postgraduate training for more than 300 resident physicians annually, interns,
fellows and researchers in 14 clinical programs and maintained a training
center for a quarter of the surgeons in the United States Armed Forces, says
Dr. A.J. Rogers, a thoracic surgeon and president of the Inland Empire J.W.
Vines Medical Society.
"Half of the Black physicians (the Inland Empire included)
practicing in California
today have rotated through one of King-Drew medical school's training programs.
It's a huge loss," said Rogers.
"To work there so many years, and see Dr. King's vision gone
bad," said Alise Conrad, a nurse manager at the hospital from 1998 to 2006, "it
hurts," Woods now works as a patient advocate in Colton.
"A living serving beacon of hope has died," said Temetry A.
Lindsey, president and CEO of Inland Behavioral and Health Services, a San Bernardino primary
care facility providing health services to the uninsured and underinsured.
"King-Drew rose from the ashes as a monument to the
struggles for access and pursuit of health for all people," says Lindsey.
"Thanks to King Hospital, many of the Black doctors who
were shunned by the country's elite medical schools are providing excellent
quality care across our state and nation."
For more than two decades, residents in Watts - beginning in
the 1950's with African American physicians like Dr. Wells Ford and Dr. Sol
White, and prominent citizens like fighter Joe Louis - pressured officials at
L.A. County, state and federal levels to obtain funds for a hospital that would
serve the predominately Black population in the Watts, Willowbrook and Compton
areas and a section of Los Angeles known as South Central, recalls State
Senator Mark Ridley Thomas (D-Los Angeles).
"The citizens were determined to have health care in their
community that equaled - in quality and accessibility - health care offered in
other communities," said Thomas
Margaret Hayden says in 2000 she moved her family to Fontana
after the demographics of her Compton neighborhood changed from proud Black
working families to largely poor immigrants, working poor Blacks, homeless,
gang members and people who had no money to pay for care.
"The hospital lost its soul. There was a lot of resentment.
The pride I remembered was no longer there."
In the end says Sen. Thomas, "It's a relief...we can now move
on to find a better solution. The need is so great. The facility was plagued by
substantial problems that could not be defended...in terms of the health and
safety of the patients."
"There's a deeply
personal relationship between hospitals and underserved communities," says
Lindsey. "Disenfranchised people see them as symbols of hope, health and
happiness. There are a lot of unanswered questions and plenty of blame to go
around. But at the end of the day we as providers owe our poorest residents access,
dignity and above all, safe quality healthcare."
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