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King-Drew-Harbor Hospital To Shut Doors

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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