This hospital has been plagued since it's inception. Read the article at the following website:
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2005/public-service/works/latimes14.html
The whole situation seems like a Catch-22. The following excerpt explains the core problem with reform at the hospital:
Fear of being called racist
At the heart of the rhetoric surrounding the hospital has been the issue few politicians want to confront: race.
Some in the core group of hospital activists have made race a central element. Members of the Board of Supervisors and other critics have been reluctant to take on problems partly for fear of being branded racists.
"Asking about King/Drew really was like touching the third rail," said Connie Rice, a prominent civil rights lawyer who is African American. "You would get such a voracious and vicious, racially accusatory backlash that no one would touch it."
As a public hospital, King/Drew cannot be a black institution â at least not officially. But in practice, it and its affiliated medical school have been black since their inception.
"It's the most symbolic and substantive institution in the black community," said state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who has been involved with the hospital throughout its history. "It is probably the only major institution in which we have a sense of ownership. King/Drew is oursâ¦. It's a product of our sweat and tears."
Most King/Drew employees â including many doctors â are black, as are the vast majority of administrators. Given all that, some community activists consider criticism of the hospital to be racist.
Several county supervisors said they had received racist hate mail over the years whenever they had spoken out about problems at King/Drew.
"They're just really, really, nasty, nasty letters," said Molina, a Latina who has been accused â falsely, she says â of wanting to change the name of the hospital to "Benito Juarez Medical Center," after the 19th century Mexican statesman and national hero.
"There are some political leaders who look at everything through a racial context," Antonovich said. "But when you have political leaders using the race card to prop up inferior medical standards and inferior management, they are doing a disservice to the community."
When supervisors talk about race-based criticism, one voice they cite is that of Ernie Smith, ombudsman for the Black Community Health Task Force, an influential grass-roots organization that is an advocate for African American interests at the hospital.
An engaging man with a PhD in comparative culture from UC Irvine, Smith (no relation to Dr. Ernie Smith, a pediatric cardiologist quoted earlier in this series) is passionate and knowledgeable about the hospital, but couches his arguments in racially bombastic language.
He has warned ominously about a Latino takeover of the hospital. In his lexicon, Garthwaite, the white physician who heads the county health department, is the "grand wizard," an allusion to the Ku Klux Klan. Police are "pigs" and "Rottweilers." King/Drew's African American administrators are establishment pawns, "old hog-maw and sauce-eatin' Negroes."
Many people associated with the hospital insist that race is no longer a significant issue there, or that it is beside the point.
"It's a hospital that's named after Dr. King, but it treats anyone who comes in the door," said former Assemblyman Roderick Wright.
Dr. Xylina Bean, who heads the neonatal division at King/Drew, argues that the hospital and its patients have been the victims of class prejudice as much as racism.
"It's based more in a concept that poor people do not deserve, just because they're poor, the same level of quality of care that the rest of the world requires," Bean said earlier this year at a community meeting. "You can call it racism if you want to, because it does tend to reflect upon specific people who just happen to be African American or just happen to be Hispanic."