how is this going to affect LA area ERs?
Harbor UCLA is obviously gonna get slammed, what about USC, what about UCLA-Olive View?
MLK is about the same distance to California Hospital downtown (also a level I trauma center, and also in some financial difficult as I recall hearing) as it is to Harbor, and since MLK hasn't been receiving trauma for months now, those EDs will be accustomed to the increase in trauma volume by now. Olive View is not particularly close to MLK, and being on the opposite site of downtown make it infeasible to transport patients there from MLK's region due to traffic.
Those two hospitals will also likely take a big chunk of the rest of the ED population that used to go to MLK, but there are several hospitals closer than those two. Both the Gardena hospitals (Gardena Memorial and Gardena Community) are closer. RFK in Hawthorne would have been pretty close but it closed 2 years ago. Centinela in Inglewood is also pretty close, but they're already operating under the burden of RFK and its sister hospital Daniel Freeman closing this year. ED wait times there were pretty bad even before those two closures, but I hear that their wait times are approaching county levels now (up to 18 hours for low level triaged cases). St. Francis in Lynwood is probably the closest hospital to MLK. Suburban Medical Center in Paramount would have been pretty close too, but that closed a little more than a year ago.
There are others nearby, but really nothing that can absorb the volume that MLK used to serve. In case you haven't already guessed, all these hospital closures are in the poorest parts of LA. Meanwhile, UCLA is building a brand-spanking new unbelievably expensive pediatric orthopedic hospital in Santa Monica, where ****loads of rich people live. Just the land alone on which the new Orthopedic Hospital is being built must be worth many tens of millions of dollars, and perhaps over a 100 million. Personally, I think the state legislature should stop allowing the medical schools to continue building in communities that can afford private care. I just looked it up. The projected build cost for the Orthopaedic Hospital is 300 million as of a year or two ago, so it's actually probably going to cost nearly twice that.
The fallout from MLK closing will mean somewhat increased volume for surrounding hospitals, but in large part it'll just mean that those patients won't get medical care at all. A lot of them don't have decent transportation to get to the hospitals further away.
Seems so. I figured you'd be interested in seeing that happen; when I saw the news originally, I was like, "ooh, wonder what GV is going to say."
