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Deficiencies at King/Drew That Resulted In the Problems and Current Status/Prognosis for King/Drew

King/Drew was the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School, established in 1966, which joined forces with the Martin Luther King General Hospital, constructed across the street in 1972 (Calderon & Beltran, 2004). Consequently, the King/Drew Medical Center (KDMC) is deemed to have opened in 1972 (Mitchell, 2006). KDMC included a 2-year medical school and a hospital located in Willowbrook (Mitchell, 2006), south of Watts (Weber, Ornstein, & Leonard, 2007) and serving mostly poor and minority residents of Watts, Compton, Willowbrook, South Central and Lynwood in South Los Angeles (Ornstein, 2005). In its decades of existence, KDMC trained thousands of doctors, served millions of people and saved thousands of lives (Calderon & Beltran, 2004).

From its inception, KDMC endured internal and external difficulties that were crippling and eventually fatal. First, its structure was inherently weak: as a two-year medical school, its access to certain types of funding, including research funding, was automatically limited and KDMC had considerable difficulty attracting high-quality students, educators and administrators (Calderon & Beltran, 2004). Secondly, its existence as a "safety-net" hospital for poor, at-risk populations further limited its funding and forced KDMC to rely on the L.A. County Department of Health Services (LACDHS) and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors (LACBOS) for funding and oversight, though those organizations already labor in a system with huge budget deficits (Calderon & Beltran, 2004). Third, KDMC faced critical issues due to changing demographics: in a five-mile radius of KDMC, from 1980 to 2000 the African-American population sank from 64% to 35%