Editorial draws comparison very favorable to the way the Duaghters fo Charity run hospitals and serve the poor.July 10, 2005
It’s easy to see why the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors would be tempted to turn the long-troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center over to a private, nonprofit corporation. The supervisors need only look at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood to see a model that works.
Just three miles from the county-owned King/Drew, the Catholic hospital serves a similar community of desperately poor and sick patients. There the comparison stops. The Daughters of Charity Health System has a reputation for running very good hospitals.
The county has a reputation for utterly mismanaging King/Drew, and has for decades. But here’s the conundrum: What nonprofit group with a reputation worth losing is going to risk taking on the inattentive nurses and negligent doctors whose medical errors have cost King/Drew its accreditation and some patients their lives?
For years, King/Drew’s defenders blamed the hospital’s problems on the challenges of serving such an impoverished community and on the county’s stingy funding.
St. Francis’ success disproves the first, and a yearlong Times investigation showed that the county spends far more per patient at King/Drew than any of its other hospitals.
