I have talked with nurses who quit after 2 1/2 years of wriing reports and letters. These letters signed by dozens of nurses were sent to the mayor, all 5 supervisors, and hospital management. After no response the nurse quit.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines
Last of Five Parts
Why Supervisors Let Deadly Problems Slide
• Fearful of provoking black protests, they shied away from imposing tough remedies on inept administrators. 'We have failed the community,' one board veteran acknowledges....
...The political price of inaction was small. Members of the Board of Supervisors rarely face serious electoral challenges, and the people being harmed were not politically powerful or well-connected.
So, given the choice — the distress of racial politics on the one side, the likelihood of more needless deaths on the other — the board chose to risk the latter....
...And the problems didn't go away. If anything, they got worse...
...In the last year, the county-owned hospital slid into such crisis that the supervisors took the strongest and least popular steps ever to fix King/Drew, closing the trauma unit and hiring an outside consulting firm to manage the hospital for a year.
As they did so, the supervisors were forced to admit that it had taken years of neglect — their neglect — for the hospital to reach such straits....
..."We should be embarrassed, all of us collectively," Supervisor Gloria Molina acknowledged at a recent meeting, "because we have failed the community."...
There have been bureaucrats too timid to tell their superiors the truth. Hospital administrators who downplayed problems. Department heads who tolerated lax discipline. State legislators and members of Congress who stood in the way of change. Regulators and accreditors who balked at sanctions. An affiliated medical school, at the private Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, that failed to provide the expertise and prestige that UCLA and USC offer other county hospitals....
...But the county board, more than anyone, had the power to shape King/Drew, for good or ill.
The supervisors have generally responded to the alarm bells at King/Drew weakly or not at all. They have expressed shock at each fresh disclosure of problems, and offered piecemeal reforms that didn't work or didn't last.
"We have not had the information that there were these kinds of problems," Burke said last December, when federal inspectors charged that the hospital was shirking the fundamentals of good patient care.
Why, asked Yaroslavsky, weren't the supervisors told that "the place is going to hell in a handbasket?"
The evidence suggests that they were told — repeatedly....
...Regulators and consultants sent reports. Whistle-blowers complained. Employees sent petitions. Newspapers wrote exposes. Mistreated patients and their families told their stories.
All that information, and more, was available to the supervisors.
But the mistakes continued and, over the years, bodies piled up. Some died in horrifying ways: poisoned by accident, paralyzed by drug overdoses, abandoned in their own vomit.
The reasons for the supervisors' failure are as complex as the county itself. Race has been an issue, but so have incompetent or neglectful workers and bureaucrats — and a rigid Civil Service system that hampers efforts to fire them....
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