News and Press

Emergency care bond mulled
June 11, 2007
by Fred Ortega, The San Gabriel Valley Tribune

An area health group is conducting surveys to gauge support for a possible $350 million bond that might help improve emergency medical services in the East San Gabriel Valley.

Citrus Valley Health Partners has hired a firm to query residents by phone about hospital and community health care needs, said Irene Bourdon, vice president of market planning for the group.

Bourdon would not confirm that the survey included questions on bond measures or other funding mechanisms.

"We are very concerned about not influencing the outcome of those surveys," Bourdon said.

But a Tribune staffer who was surveyed said pollsters asked whether he would support a $350 million bond to create an East San Gabriel Valley Health Care District.

Surveyors also asked whether respondents would be willing to pay $29 per each $100,000 on the purchase price of their homes through property taxes to pay for the bond.

Citrus Valley's hospitals include Queen of the Valley Campus in West Covina, Inter-

Community Campus in Covina and Foothill Presbyterian in Glendora.

The shortage of emergency services in the San Gabriel Valley has been an issue for years, culminating with the closure of Duarte's Santa Teresita Hospital and its emergency room in 2004.

As a result, emergency room visits at other hospitals have increased.

According to the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency, hospitals had to divert 8 percent more of their emergency patients to other facilities in 2006 compared to the previous year.

The region also lacks a Level I trauma center, which treats the most critically injured patient.

With no Level I trauma centers east of the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway, county helicopters are on call 24 hours a day to airlift patients to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena or Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Bourdon said emergency room services were part of the telephone survey, but that trauma care was not.

Hospital officials hope to draw some conclusions from the surveys -- which are ongoing -- within two months.

Nick Conway, executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments, was intrigued by the idea of a local source of emergency room funding.

"That is kind of interesting because the county still collects about $36 million a year from the San Gabriel Valley for emergency services," Conway said, referring to Measure B, passed in 2002 to raise funds for trauma centers and prevent emergency room closures.

Conway said that despite the influx of funds to the county, Valley hospitals are still struggling to keep up with emergency room demand.

Jim Lott, a spokesman for the Hospital Association of Southern California, said his group normally is supportive of the formation of health care districts.

"We believe having local health care input is vital and we found them to be constructive elsewhere in California," Lott said.

The Sequoia Healthcare District in San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, for example, has been able to establish a free medical clinic and provide health care for the county's 17,000 uninsured children through its more than $12 million in annual revenue. About $6.5 million of that came from taxes in 2006.

Representatives for county Supervisor Gloria Molina, Assemblyman Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, and Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte, expressed tentative support for looking into the health district option.

"We have heard a lot of ideas bandied about, so to hear about a survey like this is not surprising," said Roxane M rquez, spokeswoman for Molina. "We are happy that there is interest and are open to ideas like this."

Rob Charles, Hernandez's spokesman, called the idea "interesting."

"We would have to sit down with whoever is proposing this and find out more about it," he said, adding that anything that could help fill the trauma center gap in the east San Gabriel Valley would be "wonderful."

Any entity can put a bond measure on the ballot, if it collects the required signatures. The County Board of Supervisors could also put such a bond measure up for a vote.