Accreditation and Certification

The Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles and its status have been hot news items in Los Angeles for quite some time and also received considerable national attention. With the countless problems identified at the medical center, certifications and accreditation were lost leading to ultimate closure of the facility. Using King/Drew as the focus, discuss accreditation and certification, their relative significance, as well as advantages and disadvantages. Your discussion should highlight the deficiencies at the institution that resulted in the problems, and should also discuss the prognosis for the institution.
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1. The Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles and its status have been hot news items in Los Angeles for quite some time and also received considerable national attention. With the countless problems identified at the medical center, certifications and accreditations were lost leading to ultimate closure of the facility. Using King/Drew as the focus, discuss accreditation and certification, their relative significance, as well as advantages and disadvantages. Your discussion should highlight the deficiencies at the institution that resulted in the problems, and should also discuss the prognosis for the institution.

In 2007, King/Drew is operated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS) and has 48 beds. Widely publicized problems related to incompetence and mismanagement caused the hospital to undergo a radical overhaul in the recent past, bringing the number of beds down to 42 from 233. Since 2004, 260 hospital staffers, including 41 doctors, had been fired or had resigned as a result of disciplinary proceedings. It currently has 1,400 employees. To alleviate the impact on the community of the large loss of capacity, The Los Angeles County Medical Alert Center (MAC) contracts ambulances take approximately 250 patients per month to other local hospitals. (1)

The daily Trojan student Newspaper (Hawkins, 2005) reported that Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center lost its national accreditation because of health and safety violations. The problems of deficient patient care include such things as:

· Poor standard of care and there has been multiple cases of unnecessary loss of life over the past years.
· Poor management and lack of leadership has been the root of the problem at King/Drew.
· The county received a report that patients at King/Drew were treated for symptoms they did not have and that some of the clamps used for surgery were not properly sanitized, including reports of one incident where a clamp was left inside a patient’s stomach after surgery.
· From 2002-2005, incompetence caused at least three deaths in the heart unit, including one death in which the nurse failed to pay attention to a patient’s heart monitor.
· In the prenatal intensive care unit, the medical center did not have a security system, meaning anyone could walk in and steal one of the infants.
· It was also discovered that nurses did not have their certifications for basic life support.
· Attempts are under way to solve the problem of King/Drew losing its seal of accreditation. (Hawkins, 2005) (2)

Loosing its national accreditation could cause some overflow in the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center and hinder USC medical students who need to complete their resident training program. With fewer patients, there has been talk among Los Angeles county supervisors that King/Drew’s university resident training programs might be suspended since students are not gaining the necessary experience because of a lack of patients, said Ressie Roman, health deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich. Hawkins also reports that some students have already been severely impacted because the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education also withdrew its accreditation for some of the hospital’s residency …