Clamp Is Left in King/Drew Patient
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Charles Ornstein, L. A. Times, Jul. 13
Surgeons at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center mistakenly left a metal clamp the length of a ballpoint pen inside a patient two weeks ago—another in a series of lapses to occur despite the hospital’s vows to fix failings in patient care.
The clamp was left inside the unidentified patient during emergency trauma surgery for multiple gunshot wounds at the Los Angeles County-owned hospital. The error was discovered last week, when the patient underwent a chest X-ray in preparation for another surgery, county health officials confirmed Monday. The clamp was removed, and the patient does not appear to have suffered injury, the officials said.
“If there’s one thing that has been certain at King/Drew over the last few years, if not longer, it’s that aberrations happen too often, and that is obviously of great concern and frustration,” Yaroslavsky said. “I’m really just at my wit’s end…. It doesn’t seem to s. It doesn’t seem to end.”
Read the rest of this story here.
Comments from Readers
From: Courtney
The wonderful joys of affimative action!
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From: Drew
This story makes me think of something that is related to hospitals. I just saw an add from the Red Cross asking the people to donate needed blood. They had a big list of what the blood was used for. Nowhere on the list did I see anything about needing blood for treating gunshot wounds. I wonder what percentage of the donated blood is used for black people that have been shot. It’s my understanding that the great majority of people who donate blood are white. If this is true, it’s another example of how the black people are bleeding us dry!
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From: Frank P.
A few months ago PBS broadcast a show about racism.It talked about Martin Luther King hospital and claimed that white racist already dubed it Killer King even before it opened.I guess they were wrong to be prejudice about an all black hospital but they were right in assumeing that an all black hospital being dangerous.I would love to see the inspection records for this hospital. I work in a hospital and know that hospitals are inspected constantly.I wonder how many inspections have they failed.
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From: Humpty Dumpty
Negroes also have the lowest rate of organ donation by far. They are a superstitious race. Yet of cource, the lack of black-compatible organs is considered ‘racist’.
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From: Risorgimento
The following is a newspaper article on King/Drew Medical Center that addresses the blatant incompetence and open Black racism there. There is no longer a link to this very informative article. It is somewhat long, but relative to the subject matter posted here, and worth reading, as it sheds light as to why a “Clamp Is Left in King/Drew”…..
‘Blacks Only’
King/Drew Medical Center opened 25 years ago to help address racial injustice in South-Central L.A. But today, it’s a hotbed of black racism—and a source of lousy medical care for minorities
BY SUSAN GOLDSMITH
December 11, 1997
(Susan Goldsmith, New Times Los Angeles, Dec. 11-17, 1997, p. 11)
On a July day in 1996, four doctors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts sat in a hospital lounge consoling one another. Each of the physicians around the table had been passed over for the prestigious position of emergency-room chief despite stellar credentials, and they wanted to know why.
Before them sat a pile of curricula vitae from various finalists for the job. The most interesting CV was that of the man who’d landed the position—Dr. Eugene Hardin, a less experienced, undistinguished physician with whom they’d worked for years. The doctors began leafing through Hardin’s resume hoping to find some explanation of why he was picked over others who seemed much more qualified.
As Dr. Jonathan Wasserberger, a soft-spoken ER specialist, read toward the end of Hardin’s CV, he noticed something strange. Under Hardin’s list of publications, Wasserberger saw his name cited as co-author with Hardin on an article entitled, “Cyclic anti-depressant overdose in an infant: successful outcome of the youngest reported case.”
Wasserberger couldn’t believe his eyes. That article, written back in 1991, had never been published. In fact, it hadn’t even been submitted for publication.
Perhaps, thought Wasserberger, there’d been some mistake. He kept checking the CV and noticed another article with his name on it, “Aminophylline in cardiac arrest.” Hardin’s CV said it had been submitted to a professional journal called Critical Care Medicine. Again, Wasserberger was stunned. The article, he knew, had been rejected for publication.
Wasserberger turned to one of the other doctors at the table, Gary Ordog, who’d worked with him and Hardin on those articles, and pointed out the two citations. Ordog, who has more than 350 publications under his belt, was dumbfounded. He, too, knew that neither article had been published.
Just then their colleague, Dr. William Shoemaker, a nationally renowned trauma specialist, spoke up. Hardin’s CV cited several articles that he’d supposedly co-authored with Shoemaker. But Shoemaker, who has published more than 400 articles on trauma care, told the group Hardin hadn’t worked on several of the articles he listed, while others hadn’t been published. Wasserberger and Ordog then mentioned the two troubling citations they’d found.
As uneasiness spread among them, the physicians decided to walk across the street to Drew University medical school, which is affiliated with the hospital, to research the matter.
The doctors fanned out in the library, hunting for bound volumes of the journals mentioned in Hardin’s resume. One of the physicians, Subramaniam Balasubramaniam, who started the residency program in emergency medicine at King/Drew 20 years ago, searched an online database called Medline.
Soon, their research confirmed what they feared—a number of articles on Hardin’s CV had never been published. And some which had been published didn’t carry his name as an author. The astonished physicians flopped into chairs and talked about what they should do. They needed to let somebody know about this. Under rules set by their employer, the L.A. County Department of Health Services, lying on a resume to get a job was grounds for termination.
The doctors decided to notify county health chief Mark Finucane, who oversees King/Drew and the county’s five other public hospitals. After all, Finucane had signed off on Hardin’s appointment as ER chief, and the doctors were certain he’d handle the matter appropriately. They drafted a detailed letter on their findings and sent it off.
Within days, Finucane’s office contacted the King/Drew physicians, and they later met with the smooth, personable health director. He assured them that anyone caught lying even once on a CV would be fired and promised that his office would examine Hardin’s resume thoroughly. If any problems were uncovered, he pledged, appropriate action would be taken. Finucane vowed to meet with the doctors again and let them know the results of his investigation.
They never heard from him again. County investigators did, however, look into the Hardin matter and found that he’d misrepresented his credentials, big-time.
Investigators concluded that only 17 of the 36 articles Hardin said were published actually had been. Of the 19 others, investigators couldn’t find eight of them in any medical journal; five were abstracts rather than full articles, and therefore ineligible for listing as published works; three referred to the same article which didn’t bear Hardin’s name as an author; and one was a one-sentence reference in Glamour magazine to a study by Hardin and several other doctors of weapons being brought into the King/Drew ER.
Moreover, investigators discovered, Hardin had submitted another resume months earlier with a much skimpier list of publications.
In October 1996, county personnel chief Michael Henry turned over the results of the probe to Finucane, along with a memo that said, “The [Health] Department should initiate appropriate corrective action.”
So where is Dr. Hardin today? He is still chief of the emergency department at King/Drew Medical Center—one of the busiest in L.A.—and a faculty member at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.
Those familiar with Hardin aren’t surprised that he kept his job. For Hardin, unlike other candidates for the ER chief’s position, is black. And that counts for a lot at King/Drew, an institution with a well-documented history of outrageous discrimination against non-blacks and blatant favoritism toward African-Americans.
Administrators at the medical center have repeatedly allowed black employees to get away with offenses—including slapping and screaming threats and obscenities at fellow workers—that would result in dismissal at many other workplaces. Meanwhile, non-black employees—some of whom have exemplary records—have been harassed, stymied in their research, and sometimes illegally fired or passed over for promotions.
Two years ago, the county’s own Civil Service Commission issued a devastating finding of systematic racism against the medical center, saying it “has an unwritten policy of maintaining itself as a black institution, and of placing black candidates in positions of leadership within the institution, to the exclusion of non-blacks.”
The 37-page report went on to say that “evidence of intentional discrimination in favor of blacks and against non-blacks at MLK/Drew has accumulated over the years,” and that top administrators have openly and frequently stated their belief that the facility is a black institution. After reviewing thousands of pages of documents, the commission also said that the hospital had a policy of adding 10 points to the scores of African-Americans applying for medical residencies “in order to increase the number of black residents to the exclusion of non-black applicants.”
Perhaps the commission’s most disturbing finding, though, was that less qualified black physicians had been promoted and given leadership positions over more qualified non-blacks—a policy that critics say has contributed mightily to King/Drew’s notorious reputation for substandard care.
So many horror stories have emerged from the 261-bed hospital over the past decade, in fact, that it has acquired the nickname, “Killer King.” In one case, a 37-year-old woman died after a routine operation for an ovarian cyst. The hospital’s own chief of pathology at the time described the series of surgical mistakes as a “chain of stupidity and incompetence the likes of which I have never seen.”
In another case, a woman who went to the hospital for a routine hysterectomy was accidentally given a transfusion of HIV-tainted blood. She subsequently became infected with the AIDS virus. An 18-year-old victim of a drive-by shooting died after physicians accidentally slashed her jugular veins while trying to open an airway in her throat.
Then there is the story of Nelson Yamamoto, a 26-year-old sheriff’s deputy who was shot in the line of duty and brought to the hospital with a 60 percent chance of survival. Yamamoto died after receiving the wrong drugs. An exhaustive investigation by the L.A. District Attorney’s office found the officer was the victim of gross negligence. Investigators also looked at several other deaths at the hospital and found only more negligence.
“Public safety is threatened when people come to Martin Luther King Hospital for medical care and are not properly cared for by physicians who either lack the competency to properly take care of the patient or are inadequately supervised by attending physicians,” said the D.A.’s report. “[The] level of care employed at this hospital will lead to further unnecessary patient deaths.”
Dr. Ronald Wender, who is chief of anesthesiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and worked on the investigation of Yamamoto’s death, says there’s no way to sugarcoat the truth. “If that deputy had been taken care of at Harbor-UCLA or County-USC [hospitals], he would have survived,” he says. “All of the doctors reviewing that case came to exactly the same conclusions.”
The low quality of care at King/Drew is also reflected in malpractice pay-outs, which are significantly higher at the Watts hospital than any other county medical center—including huge County-USC, with more than three times as many beds. In the last 10 years, taxpayers have shelled out $31.5 million for shoddy medical work at King/Drew, compared to $25.1 million at County-USC, the nation’s busiest public hospital, according to county records.
Tragically, observers say, the ultimate victim of all this is the minority community which the hospital was built to serve. “MLK/Drew is such a political issue no one wants to deal with it,” Wender says. “The sad thing, though, is the people of that community are entitled to quality medical care.”
The county’s Board of Supervisors, however, has allowed the institutional racism that undercuts care at King/Drew to fester for years.
In 1987, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)concluded that the hospital had failed to recruit, hire, and promote Latinos. Its report blasted county officials and hospital administrators alike, saying they had deliberately destroyed records to hamper the investigation of discrimination claims. The feds ordered the hospital to stop discriminating against Hispanics and to “use fair and non-discriminatory recruitment, hiring, assignment, promotion policies and practices.”
Two years later, the county Office of Affirmative Action Compliance did its own investigation and found that the hospital and its overseer, the Department of Health Services, had done little to improve conditions for Latinos. Robert Arias, the county’s affirmative-action chief at the time, warned the Board of Supervisors that its failure to deal with rampant discrimination at the medical center would likely result in expensive lawsuits.
His prediction turned out to be right on target. Racial bias cases against King/Drew have grown and multiplied like a metastasizing cancer since the late ’80s. At least five doctors and the hospital’s former director of pharmacy have settled discrimination lawsuits out of court (the settlement terms, including any money damages, are secret.) Among those who’ve settled is Dr. Shoemaker, a white former civil-rights activist who became Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician after meeting him during the famed 1965 march on Selma.
In one lawsuit the county chose to fight, a jury awarded the physician $570,000, agreeing with his claim that he’d been overlooked for promotions, harassed, and retaliated against because he was white and Jewish. Four more doctors have discrimination lawsuits pending, and the hospital’s new pharmacy director, Amy Gutierrez, a Latina derisively referred to at King/Drew as “the white girl,” is also suing. Her suit is backed up by a Civil Service Commission finding of discrimination.
But the lawsuits and commission findings have had little effect on the situation at King/Drew.
Although Latinos constitute 37 percent of the county’s overall work force, they make up only 15 percent of King/Drew’s staff. Blacks, meanwhile, represent 10 percent of the county workforce but 67 percent of the medical center’s staff. Last year, the federal EEOC ruled that black racism was still prevalent at the medical center and reiterated its order that the county do something about it or face legal action from Washington.
Nonetheless, county supervisors and health officials continue to ignore the problem, preferring instead to spend large sums of taxpayer money to defend the hospital against bias suits.
“These charges are not conjecture—they’ve been proven,” says attorney Rees Lloyd, who has represented several doctors in discrimination claims against King/Drew. Like Shoemaker, Lloyd is a veteran civil-rights activist who spent 20 years representing Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union.
“The Board of Supervisors, with the legal and moral responsibility to stop this, has reacted with pusillanimity and an absence of any integrity whatsoever,” says Lloyd. “They have allowed it to continue because they are afraid to confront black racism.”
Hospital insiders say that some fear is warranted. Discrimination at the medical center has been accompanied by threats and racial bullying by black employees and their supporters in the community. Those who publicly criticize the hospital are called racists, and those who speak out within the institution have been threatened and had their cars vandalized. “You’ve got an explosive situation out there,” says John Hill, current director of the county’s Office of Affirmative Action Compliance. “The [black] community has its own ideas about the hospital.”
Shortly after former affirmative-action chief Arias presented his findings of discrimination to the Board of Supervisors, he received a threatening phone call and his car was trashed. A temporary employee working in the hospital’s pharmacy department was slapped in the face and called “a stinky white bitch” by a black female co-worker. When the department supervisor complained to hospital higher-ups about the incident, they did nothing. Gary Ordog, a white physician, found razor blades in his research files after he complained about discriminatory treatment. And Wender, the Cedars-Sinai doctor who participated in the D.A.’s investigation of Deputy Yamamoto’s death, was later threatened and harassed.
“I got messages on my voice mail that said, ‘We’re going to get you, you racist son-of-a-bitch,’” recalls Wender. “My hospital also got calls from people in Watts, saying, ‘Did you know you have a racist on your staff? How can you have such a racist working for you?”
Boyd James, a psychiatry professor at Drew medical school, was harassed by several black colleagues when he tried to deliver a lecture on Freud. “They said, ‘That’s white-boy stuff,’” says James, who is a black from the West Indies. Most disturbing to James, though, was when he was called a “nigger” and threatened in an anonymous letter for doing research with two white colleagues at the medical center.
“There is very abusive stuff going on,” says James, who has taught at the medical school since 1986. “The county knows…what is happening there, and it is responsible for the warfare. If it were not for blackness, the county would have closed this place down.”
Ironically, the hospital was built after the 1965 Watts riots to help address decades of racial injustice against blacks.
Federal and local authorities examining the cause of the fiery uprising determined that a primary reason was bitterness over the critical shortage of medical facilities in South-Central L.A., which at the time was 70-80 percent black. Martin Luther King Jr. hospital opened in 1972 and was followed nine years later by Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, named for the brilliant black physician who invented an efficient way to store blood plasma.
Drew University—whose medical school is publicly funded but whose undergraduate program is not—has a mission to train health professionals who will eventually work in medically underserved communities like Watts. Its undergraduate program has about 650 students, and the medical school another 100. Today, the bustling King/Drew complex off Wilmington Avenue includes several buildings and a mental health center that sit on neatly manicured grounds.
When the hospital opened, accomplished physicians of all races were brought in to help build a solid medical operation. But about a decade later, African-American administrators began pushing to put more and more blacks in key positions. “In the beginning, the goal was to create a good academic institution,” says one physician who has been there since the hospital’s founding. “Once it got a little established, they wanted to replace everyone with black leadership. They wanted to make this a leading institution for blacks.”
The drive to make the medical center a “black institution” coincided with a dramatic demographic shift in L.A. By the mid-1980s, Latinos—their numbers reinforced by a large influx of Mexican and other Central American immigrants—had replaced blacks as the city’s largest minority group. “The change in demographics came around 1985 when the Latinos came in, and that’s when the problems at the hospital started,” one doctor recalls. Today, Latinos represent 80 percent of the hospital’s admissions and at least half of South L.A.’s population.
And so the medical center that was erected to help right racial wrongs stands, 25 years later, as a symbol of racial bias and strife. “If the racial group doing the discriminating was white, you’d have people screaming about this,” says Alan Clayton, spokesman for the 1,400-member L.A. County Chicano Employees Association, which performed the analysis of the hospital’s hiring practices in the 1980s that led to the EEOC probe. “The feds and the county have both found that the practices at the hospital are abysmal. It’s a disgrace, and the county won’t deal with it.”
But hospital supporters say much of the trouble at King/Drew is the fault of the media, which, they say, singles out the Watts facility for criticism while ignoring problems at other county hospitals. “This is the most maligned institution in this city,” says Dr. Edward Savage, King/Drew’s medical director. “There is very little turmoil in this hospital except that which is created by the press.”
Asked about the overwhelming evidence compiled not by the media but by government investigators that the medical center is a racist institution, Savage dismisses it, saying King/Drew is simply an easy target.
“Beasts of prey always attack the young and the ones less capable of defending themselves…It’s a question of political power,” he says. “We are the only [county hospital] that has anything but white chairmen. The other hospitals have no Asians, no African-Americans, and no Latinos in chairmanship positions. It’s really ironic that we are most often accused of racism when we are, by far, the most diverse.”
(County records show that outside of King/Drew, which has eight black department chairs, there’s only one other African-American department head in the county hospital system—at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar. There are, however, 11 Asian and two Latino department chairs in the hospital network.)
One of King/Drew’s strongest supporters is county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, whose district includes the hospital. Burke, the only African-American member of the board, defends the medical center’s control by blacks, saying many other local hospitals are dominated by single ethnic groups.
“Cedars-Sinai Hospital probably has a higher percentage of Jewish doctors, and if you go to [the] San Gabriel [Valley], you’ll find a higher percentage of Asian doctors,” she says. “There are fewer whites at [King/Drew] just as there are fewer African-Americans at other hospitals.”
Burke and other defenders also say King/Drew is no worse than any other county hospital when it comes to the frequency of discrimination complaints. But the county has destroyed many relevant documents and has little information to support that contention. The Office of Affirmative Action Compliance only keeps statistics on discrimination claims dating to 1995. “Anything before that has been destroyed,” says Hayward Harris, a senior deputy affirmative-action officer. (Such destruction of records is a violation of the EEOC agreement, which mandates that all files on racial bias claims be maintained.) For the three years for which records haven’t been thrown away, King/Drew ranks third out of the six county hospitals, with 24 complaints filed. County officials also have only fragmentary information on how much they’ve paid out to settle discrimination claims, since they only began tracking such numbers in 1995.
Despite the limited records, a public-health specialist on the staff of a county supervisor says there’s no argument on one salient point: King/Drew is the only county hospital that has been repeatedly found guilty of racial discrimination by federal and county investigators.
One of the ways in which discrimination manifests itself at King/Drew is in higher salaries paid to some black physicians for performing the same or similar jobs as non-black colleagues. One black doctor was paid $100,000 more a year for the very same job a white physician held a year earlier. Another black doctor made $55,000 more a year to teach at the medical school than did his boss, an Indian physician who was several rungs higher on the academic pay scale.
Hospital medical director Savage confirms that there are wide discrepancies in salaries but defends them, saying it’s standard business practice to pay more to employees with special skills and talents.
“When Shaquille O’Neal came in to play basketball, he was paid far more and nobody called that discrimination,” Savage says. “Salaries have to do with market demand and an institution’s own needs.”
But in both cases, the black physicians were less qualified than non-blacks earning less, according to the Civil Service Commission. And it’s illegal to pay less qualified workers more than better qualified ones based on race, says John Hill, director of the county’s affirmative-action compliance office.
“It’s called wage discrimination. You cannot pay a subordinate more than his or her boss because of race…under any circumstances,” he says.
The county’s handling of Dr. Eugene Hardin suggests another kind of double standard.
County policy clearly states that the penalty for a doctor who lies on his CV for employment purposes is termination. Indeed, county health chief Finucane canned one of his top lieutenants last year for falsifying his academic credentials. In a letter to the administrator, Finucane wrote, “Your dishonesty undermines the credibility of the department in its interactions with the work force, other public agencies and the public at large.”
But faced with a similar situation involving a prominent black doctor at King/Drew, Finucane did little.
Shortly after county investigators forwarded their conclusions about Hardin’s resume to Finucane, the physician was demoted from his job as head of the hospital’s emergency department. However, he later filed a 22-page appeal and was reinstated.
Finucane refused to comment on Hardin because of pending litigation by other King/Drew doctors. But in a recent interview, Hardin insisted he didn’t falsify his CV and claimed he’s the victim of vengeful colleagues who were angry at being passed over for the position of ER chief.
“Once I handed in my [appeal], it was all overturned and the demotion was reversed,” he says. “On a CV, if you aren’t familiar with how doctors put those together, you can think things are fraudulent…The whole thing boils down to professional jealousy and envy, and could even be racism.”
But Hardin’s appeal conveniently ignores some major problems in his CV. For one, he doesn’t address investigators’ findings that several articles he claimed to have published couldn’t be found in medical journals. Hardin also ignores the 13 discrepancies investigators found between the two resumes he submitted.
Hardin’s attorney, Kurt Harrison, who prepared the appeal, insists one of Hardin’s colleagues at King/Drew secretly erased his name or changed the titles of the articles before they were published. “If Dr. Hardin’s name fails to appear on the articles, or if they were not published as indicated…, it was because his name was removed or the article was published differently than indicated without his knowledge,” Harrison says in the appeal.
Hardin’s colleagues dismiss that explanation as pure nonsense. “Why would anybody do that?” asks Dr. Jonathan Wasserberger. “These articles were published years and years ago. People don’t do that stuff.”
Regarding the article submitted in 1991 but never published, attorney Harrison says it was legitimate for Hardin to list it on his CV since the physician believes it may still see print someday. But medical experts say holding that belief after so much time has passed is ludicrous.
“Six years later? That is absurd,” retorts Dr. Jerome Kassirer, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. “Anybody who looks at a CV and sees the the word ‘submitted’ should immediately have questions. It’s ridiculous to list submitted publications on your CV publications list. There isn’t a single [hospital] committee on credentials that would consider it legitimate.”
Kassirer adds that falsifying a resume is grounds for termination at hospitals across the country. “Physicians who put their CV’s together can make one mistake and possibly two. It is totally inconceivable someone could make 19,” he says. “Nineteen falsehoods on a CV is an egregious fault and that person should be dismissed.”
Harrison also argues in the appeal that Hardin’s demotion was unfair, since two of his white colleagues, Ordog and Wasserberger, were found guilty by Drew University officials of falsifying data in a published article but weren’t punished.
The lawyer completely misstates what happened in that case, however. In fact, Ordog and Wasserberger were cleared of any misconduct by a Drew University investigating committee. The attorney also neglects to mention that it was his client, Hardin, who leveled the accusations that were subsequently thrown out.
But Hardin’s questionable CV wasn’t the only problem uncovered by county investigators.
In his personnel file they found a falsified document indicating he’d been certified to teach advanced cardiac life-support techniques, according to Fred Leaf, chief of compliance and contracts for the county health department. Advanced cardiac instructor cards, issued by the American Heart Assn., are required before a physician can run a hospital 911 base station and teach the course to medical residents. Base-station doctors and residents communicate with ambulance crews, telling them how to stabilize badly injured people as they rush them to the emergency room.
According to Leaf’s testimony before the county Civil Service Commission, investigators presented the matter of Hardin’s phony cardiac card to King/Drew administrators last year. Doctors at the medical center are still trying to determine if and how many residents were “trained” by Hardin. Anyone he instructed between 1994 and 1996 must be retrained by a physician holding a valid card, says Dr. Balasubramaniam, who has been director of advanced cardiac life support at King/Drew for the last 18 years.
“The…card Hardin presented to my secretary in 1996 claiming he was an instructor because he wanted to teach was fraudulent, and the county confirmed my conclusion,” says Balasubramaniam, who is known to colleagues simply as Dr. Bala. “Here you have the No. 1 man in the [emergency] department falsifying his credentials…It’s terrible.”
Responding to this additional charge, Hardin again resorts to the defense that colleagues somehow set him up.
“That is made up by [doctors suing King/Drew over discrimination],” he says. “They found my signature someplace, they made up the card, and said it was mine.”
Bala calls that allegation laughable. “He presented that card to my secretary,” he says. “The card in his file has his signature. That speaks for itself.”
Hardin’s story isn’t the only instance of special treatment for blacks at King/Drew.
Consider the case of Dr. H. Range Hutson, a black hired as interim head of the emergency department in 1994. Hutson didn’t have to compete for the job, even though there were several more qualified non-blacks already on staff at the medical center, according to a Civil Service Commission finding. Administrators brought him in as a contract employee rather than a civil servant and paid him $240,000 a year—$100,000 more than his white predecessor. To get around county salary regulations, administrators paid him by means of monthly $20,000 invoices drawn against the hospital supplies budget, according to records obtained by New Times.
Several doctors say that paying Hutson out of the supplies budget meant that critical medical materials weren’t always available. “Because all that supply money was going to Hutson, we didn’t have funds for basic airway maintenance equipment to take care of pediatric patients,” one emergency-room physician says. “We got a child with a gunshot wound to the face along with some burned children around that time, and we didn’t have the right equipment.”
Shortly after Hutson arrived at the hospital he fired Dr. Harry Kram, a white surgeon. That action, according to the civil service commission, was illegal. Worried administrators swiftly rescinded Kram’s firing, and he soon returned to work.
But Hutson didn’t stop there. A few weeks later, he challenged Kram to a fight, demanding with fists clenched that his fellow physician step into the hall. Another white doctor, William Shoemaker, said in a sworn legal declaration that Hutson verbally assaulted him around the same time in a hospital dining room, shrieking: “Stay the fuck out of my way or I will fuck you over permanently.”
Fearful for his life, Kram went to court and obtained a restraining order prohibiting Hutson, his boss, from threatening him again. The conflict became so bad that a dozen ER physicians, including several black doctors, signed a petition imploring county officials to remove Hutson on account of his behavior. Hutson, who insiders say was never disciplined for firing or threatening Kram, remained on contract at King/Drew for another year until he resigned.
“Who would believe you could have surgeons working in this kind of environment?” says attorney Rees Lloyd, who represented Kram in a discrimination suit that resulted in a financial settlement against the county. “This is a thug environment masquerading as some higher political reality.”
Sadly, a number of non-black doctors who have been unfairly hassled, threatened, or fired at King/Drew were there not because they had to be, but because they wanted to serve a community in which quality health care services are few and far between.
“Many of my colleagues have been devastated by what has happened here and just walked away in complete disgust and hopelessness,” says Bala, who has worked at King/Drew since 1978. “All of us could have gone somewhere else and we didn’t.”
Moreover, several of the non-black physicians fired, demoted, or hassled at the medical center were some of its most accomplished employees.
For instance, Gary Ordog, an ER doctor fired in 1995 for alleged insubordination, had won the health department’s Most Productive Employee of the Year award in 1993 and 1994. Ordog was selected from among 25,000 health department employees for developing two innovative techniques for treating gunshot wounds that officials estimate saved the county more than $1 billion in the previous decade.
Ordog, who also had exemplary job reviews, was canned after hospital administrators sent him a letter ordering him to work an upcoming shift while he was out of the country. When he didn’t show up, he was fired. The hospital’s own personnel director, Carolyn Hendricks, testified recently that Ordog’s termination did not meet any of the civil service requirements for a firing. There was no documentation on the termination, he had not been warned, and hadn’t been given any opportunity to respond, Hendricks said.
Ordog, who filed a civil service grievance over his termination and is also suing the medical center for discrimination, says he still struggles to understand what happened to him at King/Drew.
“I was trying to help turn the place from what some people refer to as ‘Killer King’ into a world-class medical facility,” says Ordog, 43, who had worked at the medical center for 18 years. “The things they did to me and others were just horrendous—daily harassment and retaliation.”
He says that one year, King/Drew administrators took his mailbox away, and another year they prohibited him from reviewing hospital records for his research on gunshot wounds. “It just makes me sick and nauseated to think about it,” he says.
Other non-black physicians who’ve won recognition outside the hospital tell similar stories. A white doctor’s lab equipment was locked up and his faculty position terminated shortly after he received national acclaim and media attention for a back-pain treatment he developed. A jury awarded him more than a half million dollars for the harassment, retaliation, and discrimination he suffered at the medical center.
Despite the accomplishments and stature of many of those making discrimination complaints, county supervisor Burke insists that some are marginal employees just trying to cover their rear ends.
“There are some people and there are some questions as to whether they can do their jobs, and you also can’t keep them because they happen to be white,” she says.
It’s that kind of dismissiveness by top county officials which has aggravated the discriminatory climate at King/Drew, which is perhaps best epitomized by the hospital’s treatment of Bala.
A serious, businesslike surgeon from India, he came to the hospital in 1978 to help develop an emergency department. He chose King/Drew over positions at other local hospitals because he wanted to work in a medically underserved community. “I took it for granted that an institution bearing Martin Luther King’s name would be a fair and equitable place,” says Bala, 57.
After six years as acting chair of the King/Drew emergency department, he was offered the position permanently on one condition: that he appoint a vice-chair who was black.
Bala refused, saying he’d hire only the most qualified vice-chair regardless of race. In response, hospital administrators replaced him with a black acting chief of emergency medicine, according to a 1995 conclusion by the Civil Service Commission.
Since his refusal, Bala has repeatedly been passed over for the position despite outstanding job-performance reviews year after year. “The institutional pattern of discrimination is clearly evident in the history of MLK/Drew’s treatment of Dr. Bala,” the civil service finding said, adding that he was clearly the most qualified for the job.
“I read that report and thought I would be appointed automatically,” says Bala, who also has a discrimination case pending against the county. Yet even after the devastating finding of institutional discrimination, county officials did nothing.
Not long after the ruling, the ER chief’s job went to Hardin, the less experienced physician with the woefully problematic CV.
“They have betrayed me and Martin Luther King,” says Bala. “There has been and continues to be blatant, open discrimination at MLK/Drew, and nobody seems to care.
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From: Sigurd
Risorgimento thanks for posting the article.
It’s quite a different picture than one gets watching ER the television show. Doctors must be well aware of this type of thing.
(Posted on July 15, 2004)