King/Drew and how the County of Los Angeles has failed

Here is my most recent letter to the LA Times regarding their recent article “King/Drew Treatment Errors Cited” and the comments made by LA County Officials:

August 5, 2004

Editor
Los Angeles Times
Times Mirror Square
Los Angeles, CA

Re: “King/Drew Treatment Errors Cited”

Dear Editor,

It would appear from Dr. Garthwaite’s comments that he fails to comprehend the seriousness of the nature of the 3 areas of deficiencies that were identified by the Federal inspectors. What’s worse, it would appear that he is trying to minimize the seriousness of the findings. All three areas identified are critical areas of hospital performance!

Nursing, and patient rights (which is actually a responsibility of nursing) are two areas where the County has hired a sole source vendor for the sum of over $600,000 to provide direct management. To attempt to shift blame by saying that the nurses were “travel nurses”, doesn’t exonerate the failed management of the nursing management company or the nursing management team. In a hospital the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) is ultimately responsible for the nursing care provided by his/her nurses. The same for patient rights and advocacy – it is the function of the nurse to advocate for his/her patient. As to the physical plant, Dr. Garthwaite and his team are directly responsible for this area and for the failure.

Contrary to the assertions of Dr. Garthwaite and county officials the problems are not different from those found at the last inspections – they are in fact still the same. Medications errors continue. It doesn’t matter if the medication errors occurred on the inpatient wards or in the ER, it is a failure of the pharmacy and nursing. The same goes for the nursing errors, it doesn’t matter if these errors were made by temporary (travel) nurses or staff nurses. The CNO and the nursing management team are responsible and the patients suffer the consequences. Once again the Department of Health Services and Dr. Garthwaite appear unwilling to take ownership for their failures.
It is now up to the Board of Supervisors to take ownership for the failures of their management team. The remedy, however, is quite simple; the Supervisors can fire the head of DHS on any given Tuesday with a vote of three. I highly recommend that they take that step and show us some leadership!

Sincerely,
Geneviève M. Clavreul, RN, Ph.D.