Centinela Hospital Emergency Room Service Upgraded : Health care: The facility’s return to county network should improve response time in Inglewood and South-Central. The licensing change allows medical center to handle public ambulances.

Centinela Hospital Medical Center has upgraded its emergency room in a move that county officials predict could improve emergency response in Inglewood and surrounding cities.

The Inglewood hospital stopped accepting most 911 ambulances four years ago when it “down-licensed” its emergency room to standby status. At the time, hospital leaders said the change was necessary to stop huge losses from treating patients unable to pay their bills.

Now, in an unusual step, Centinela has received state approval to expand emergency services.

The hospital will be able to handle public ambulance traffic. Ambulances carrying obstetrics patients are now being routed to another area hospital, Centinela President Russell S. Stromberg said.

Centinela and county officials currently are discussing what role the 403-bed nonprofit hospital will play in the county 911 network, Stromberg said.

“We certainly need additional emergency departments in that area,” said Virginia Price-Hastings, Los Angeles County director of emergency medical services. She called the development the first time since the mid-1980s that an area hospital has “up-licensed” its emergency department.

In fact, a number of hospitals have moved in the opposite direction, downgrading their emergency rooms to standby status for financial reasons.

Public ambulances responding to 911 calls will not be routed to Centinela until the county and other area hospitals determine the service areas covered by each facility, Price-Hastings said. Those ambulances now head for emergency rooms at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood and two other South Bay hospitals.

Centinela’s return to the network would improve emergency service in the busy Inglewood and South-Central area and may even help relieve pressure on the county’s Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Willowbrook, Price-Hastings said.

Centinela Hospital downgraded its 10-bed emergency room in May, 1989, blaming what hospital officials called “the magnitude and disproportionate number of indigent and government-sponsored patients seeking care through the hospital emergency room.” Under an agreement with the county, the hospital continued to accept obstetrics patients transported by paramedic ambulance.

But that agreement expired last summer, and ambulances began transporting obstetrics cases to the new obstetrics unit at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood. The county had helped arrange financing for the unit in a plan aimed at relieving crowded obstetrics wards at county hospitals.

Centinela’s Stromberg pointed to the rerouting of obstetrics cases as a reason why his hospital is now considering taking other ambulances. The emergency room could not have handled both expectant mothers and gunshot victims at the same time, he said.

The hospital spent about $20,000 remodeling its emergency department to meet guidelines for upgrading, he said. The state Department of Health Services on March 24 approved Centinela as a “basic” emergency room, meaning it will have physician coverage 24 hours a day. That designation is required for a hospital to accept paramedic ambulances.

The county is now studying how the change at Centinela will affect the current 911 service areas that are intended to prevent ambulances from being “diverted” or bounced when emergency rooms are too busy to take them.

“We’ll be sitting down with all the hospitals and trying to get consensus on service areas,” Price-Hastings said.