Blunder Handcuffs Juvenile Hall Plan

County Medical Center Resigned to Hardships

It’s shameful that Ventura County Medical Center employees must eat meals in temporary trailers--and that the dreary arrangement will most likely continue longer than expected, says hospital administrator Sam Edwards.

For months now, food workers at Ventura County Medical Center have prepared 800 meals a day from three semitrailers serving as a kitchen in the hospital’s parking lot.

The metal floor slants a little and muscled men are needed to push heavy carts loaded with hot food across the parking lot and into the hospital. It’s not ideal, but it’s supposed to be temporary.

Nearby, white-coated lab technicians who perform hundreds of critical hospital tests every day are forced to work in cramped and crumbling conditions in the hospital’s oldest wing. Lab workers have also been counting on a modernization project to relieve the crowding.

But completion of both projects may now be delayed up to two years as the county scrambles to pay off its $15.3-million Medicare fraud settlement. Edwards has the thankless task of telling his employees to hang on a little longer.

“They think it’s a disgrace,” Edwards said. “They put up with an awful lot and now they’re going to have to put up with more.”

For the county, it is another setback in its long quest to upgrade obsolete buildings at the medical center. The laboratory is in a portion of the hospital built in 1921. Nearby buildings housing a kitchen were so old and unsafe that the county tore them down last year.

Contractors are relocating utility systems, replacing an emergency generator and updating the medical center’s electrical system, work that will be completed next spring. The $15-million construction of a building to house a laboratory, cafeteria and kitchen, slated to begin later, is now in jeopardy.

Supervisor Kathy Long says the hospital may need to look into the possibility of contracting out laboratory services.

“We are going to have to be very conservative in our decisions on future commitment of funds,” Long said. “We may have to seriously consider that.”

Before the utility work began, the county had already launched two unsuccessful construction proposals for the Ventura hospital. The first--a $56-million outpatient center, parking structure, kitchen and laboratory--was summarily shot down by voters in 1996 after neighboring Community Memorial bankrolled a $1.6-million campaign to defeat it.

The second--a scaled-down $28-million version that would have included a kitchen, laboratory and parking garage--was approved by the Board of Supervisors in October 1996. But supervisors rescinded their vote after Community Memorial mounted a signature-gathering campaign to stop it.

Both the laboratory and the kitchen are critically needed, Edwards said. The county hospital serves as the safety net for poor residents who need medical care, and to a large degree doctors today depend on lab tests to decide on a course of treatment, he said.

“A lot of diagnoses involve doing tests,” Edwards said. “There are thousands of tests that we do here.”

Lab space is so cramped that technicians perform hundreds of tests, such as pap smears, in an “office” the size of a closet. A small office for secretaries actually was a closet just a few years ago, Edwards said.

Food service is just as important, he said. In the course of any week, about 2,000 county employees, as well as hospital patients and their families, depend on the cafeteria for food. The closest restaurants and cafes are two blocks away.

“An army travels on its food and so does a hospital,” Edwards said.

There are other problems. The cafeteria, for instance, does not have a bathroom. So when food server Charlene Hernandez needs to relieve herself, she must ask someone to cover her at the counter and then run to the kitchen or across the parking lot into the hospital.

Employees gripe about lack of space, Hernandez said. And then there was the day a customer, an older man, started yelling at her because he needed a washroom and one was not available.

“It can get pretty frustrating,” she said.