Martin Luther King Jr. Outpatient Center

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Martin Luther King Jr. Outpatient Center
Los Angeles County Department of Health Services
Geography
Location	Willowbrook, California, United States
Organization
Care system	Public
Funding	Government hospital
Type	Community
History
Opened	1972; 52 years ago (1972)
Closed	2007
Links
Website	dhs.lacounty.gov/wps/portal/dhs/mlk
Lists	Hospitals in California

The Martin Luther King Jr. Outpatient Center, formerly known as Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center (King/Drew), and later Martin Luther King Jr.–Harbor Hospital (MLK–Harbor or King–Harbor), was a public urgent care center and outpatient clinic and former hospital in Willowbrook, an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County, California, north of the city of Compton and south of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. It closed in 2007.

Founded as a major public hospital, it was shut down in August 2007 because of its poor record of patient care. The urgent care center and outpatient clinic, however, remained operating on the site. In 2014, a smaller hospital under a partnership between Los Angeles County and the University of California opened as a nonprofit organization governed by a seven-member board of directors.^[1][2]

MLK Outpatient Center was operated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

At the beginning of the 21st century and before its crisis, MLK–MACC (then MLK/Drew) had 537 beds, was the teaching hospital of the adjacent Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, spread over a 38.5-acre (156,000 m²) site, which included a dormitory for medical residents, employed 2,238 full-time personnel, and in 2004 treated 11,000 inpatients and 167,000 outpatients.

Located near high-crime streets, the hospital had a very active trauma unit. In 2003, it handled 2,150 gunshot wounds and other life-threatening injuries. Because of the large number of gunshot wounds the trauma unit saw, the United States Armed Forces sent their trauma teams to MLK/Drew for training.

After 2004, 260 of its staffers, including 41 doctors, had been fired or had resigned as a result of disciplinary proceedings. To alleviate the impact on the community of this large loss of capacity, the Los Angeles County Medical Alert Center contracted ambulances to take approximately 250 patients per month to other local hospitals.^[3]

In the 2000s, widely publicized problems related to incompetence and mismanagement caused the hospital to undergo a radical overhaul, which reduced the number of beds from 233 to 42 before it finally closed in 2007.^[4] It was replaced by the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital.