Another Area Hospital Asks to Treat Fewer Emergencies : Health Care: Officials say non-paying patients are costing Gardena’s Memorial Hospital too much.

Memorial Hospital of Gardena has submitted a request to county health officials to downgrade its emergency room status, a move that would stop paramedics from bringing emergency cases to the hospital.

Hospital officials said the request was made because it is costing them too much to care for non-paying emergency cases. “It’s the huge burden of uncompensated care that’s forcing us to make this change,” said hospital administrator George Rooth.

The hospital’s emergency room has become overwhelmed by the growing number of patients brought to its facilities from outside the Gardena area. As more trauma centers and emergency rooms close countywide, the hospital has received increasing numbers of patients from greater distances, Rooth said.

If approved, the request would downgrade the private 200-bed facility from paramedic receiving status to standby status, probably in February, hospital officials said. Emergency services would still be available for walk-ins and some private ambulances.

County officials said the Gardena hospital receives about 300 paramedic runs a month.

Gardena city officials, concerned about the effect the curtailment will have on emergency services for Gardena residents, are planning to meet with county health officials Jan. 29, said City Manager Kenneth Landau. Officials will discuss ways to try to keep the emergency room open for residents of the immediate Gardena area, he said.

This is not the first cutback at the Gardena hospital because of patient payment problems. Last June, the Gardena hospital stopped accepting Medi-Cal patients, saying reimbursement procedures were cumbersome and reimbursement rates were so low that they were causing the facility to lose money.

In seeking to downgrade its license, the Gardena hospital is following the lead of Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood, which closed its emergency room doors to paramedic patients last May. Countywide, other hospitals, including Beverly Hills Medical Center, have made similar requests recently.

The two South Bay hospitals that will continue to provide emergency services in the area surrounding Gardena--north of Redondo Beach Boulevard--are Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood.

The county’s Emergency Medical Services Commission discussed the Gardena hospital’s request at a meeting last week, said Barbara Pavey, head of operations and monitoring for the EMS agency of the county’s Department of Health Services.

“We don’t really know yet what the impact will be,” if the request is granted, Pavey said. “We’re in the process of evaluating that question. . . . Three-hundred runs a month is not a large number compared to bigger hospitals, but it’s still 300 runs that will have to be redistributed.”

County officials must make a recommendation to the state before a licensing change is approved, Pavey said.

Anita Bantle, vice president for nursing services at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, said that, although she could not accurately estimate how much more paramedic traffic would go to her hospital should Memorial Hospital’s request be approved, an increase seems inevitable.

After Centinela shut its paramedic services last year, there was “a noticeable increase” in the number of paramedic patients transported to Daniel Freeman, Bantle said.

Officials at Daniel Freeman only recently found out about Memorial Hospital’s request to downgrade and have not had time to examine what the effect may be on the hospital’s staff and budget, Bantle said.

“We accept paramedic traffic, and we certainly want to continue doing that,” said Bantle, adding that “finances are certainly a concern for all of us.”

Although the Gardena hospital is farther away than Centinela in relation to Daniel Freeman, Bantle said the closing of its paramedic services may leave fewer referral options for Daniel Freeman’s base station, from which hospital officials radio paramedics with information about available emergency beds.

“With fewer facilities trying to take care of the same number of patients, you’re going to have an increase somewhere,” Bantle said.

In the past three years, about 10 Los Angeles County hospitals have downgraded or shut down paramedic services, and another 10 have closed trauma centers, said David Langness, a spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California, an association of 225 private and public hospitals.

“It has reached a crisis stage,” Langness said. “Each time a trauma center closes or a paramedic center chooses to ‘down-license,’ it makes access to care that much more difficult in an emergency situation, when you need the most rapid access.”