Jennifer Ahdout had planned to spend her third and fourth years
of medical school working at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical
Center in South Los Angeles.
But now her medical school experience will take a different
path.
After King/Drew failed multiple patient care inspections and
faced the prospect of losing federal funding, Los Angeles county
officials voted Oct. 4 to cut down the hospital’s services
and transfer management to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, leaving
medical students such as Ahdout hanging.
Ahdout, a second-year student at the UCLA David Geffen School of
Medicine, chose to enroll in UCLA’s joint education program
with Drew University specifically because of her interest in
working with the underprivileged communities King/Drew serves.
Students in the program spend their first two years studying at
UCLA and their second two working at King/Drew.
“I was looking forward to that training,” Ahdout
said.
UCLA Health Sciences spokeswoman Dale Tate said UCLA medical
students doing rotations at King/Drew will be moved to other
UCLA-affiliated hospitals.
“We’re following them closely and monitoring the
situation,” she said, adding that the students will
eventually be transferred to the UCLA hospitals in Westwood and
Santa Monica, as well as facilities such as Cedars-Sinai, Olive
View, Harbor-UCLA and the Veterans Administration Hospital in
Brentwood.
Tate said UCLA does not have any residents who are not part of
the joint UCLA-Drew program at King/Drew, and that she did not
expect the residency program at Harbor-UCLA to be affected.
Ahdout said Gerald Levey, vice chancellor of health sciences and
dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine, had addressed all the
UCLA medical students involved in the Drew program and told them
there was plenty of room for them to continue their studies at
other hospitals within the UCLA system. Ahdout added that the
Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education had also
agreed to help redistribute the residents working at King/Drew.
But she said while she was glad her education would not be
interrupted, she believes training at King/Drew had certain
advantages other hospitals do not.
Ahdout, who had volunteered at King/Drew for a year, said
because of the hospital’s historic role as a resource for an
underserved community, it provided medical students with a unique
environment.
“King/Drew is like a family,” she said. “The
patients there were always so grateful.”
Ahdout said that same familial quality translated to the
attentive training medical students receive at King/Drew.
“The training we get at Drew is really unique. We get a
lot of personal attention from the attendings,” she said.
“I have a friend who works at Drew, and when she talks to
her colleagues at (other UCLA hospitals) they don’t get to do
that. She did a rotation at Harbor, and she wasn’t
happy.”
Harbor officials have also expressed concern about the effect
the merger could have on the quality of care at that hospital.
Some have expressed concern that Harbor, which is about 10 miles
away from King/Drew, may not be able to adequately absorb the
additional patient traffic.
“It must be recognized that Harbor-UCLA’s resources
are already stretched thin and that care must be taken to avoid
weakening our hospital’s ability to serve its patients and
carry on our health care mission,” the Harbor-UCLA Faculty
Society wrote in a statement released Oct. 2.
Ahdout said she is also worried about what will happen to the
South Los Angeles community now that it will no longer have a fully
functional local hospital.
“I’m concerned for the community,” she said.
“About 1.6 million people are currently being served (by
King/Drew). People are sad. No one really thought this was going to
happen.”
And while Ahdout acknowledged the embattled hospital may have
had managerial problems, she said she did not see much evidence of
those issues on a daily basis.
“I don’t think it was a matter of the quality of the
physicians,” she said. “The physicians at Drew are
coming from top colleges and universities. They chose to come to
Drew because they believe in it,” she said.
At the end of the day, Ahdout said she was happy the county had
opted to keep King/Drew open in some capacity, and that she was
optimistic about the hospital’s ability to eventually
recover.