The Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital (MLKCH) received a generous grant in April 2017 from the Ahmanson Foundation. The award serves a very practical and urgent purpose: it creates a new endoscopy suite, assisting to the hospital in expanding its inpatient services.
Ahmanson Gift Supports New Endoscopy Suite
With the new space and equipment here at MLKCH, we'll be able to serve our patients immediately, without the risk of wait times and transfers to a more distant facility. They’ll be closer to home and family, ensuring a quicker and more complete recovery.
Ozell DiazMLKCH PeriOperative Director
The hospital’s new endoscopy suite will provide for the diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal illness, various cancers, benign tumors, ulcers, and gallbladder disease—all conditions common among our patients. Having endoscopy on site will save lives as well, creating the capacity for emergency interventions with life-saving consequences.
"With active, internal bleeding, saving the patient's life requires a rapid response. That’s where the endoscopy suite comes in," says Ozell Diaz, PeriOperative Director at MLKCH, who will oversee the new services. "Transferring a patient to another hospital for this procedure costs that person, and her healthcare providers, critical time in a life-threatening situation. With the new space and equipment here at MLKCH, we'll be able to serve our patients immediately, without the risk of wait times and transfers to a more distant facility. They’ll be closer to home and family, ensuring a quicker and more complete recovery."
About the Expansion of Services
The addition of an endoscopy suite is part of the hospital's planned expansion of inpatient services.
The financial support for the build-out of the MLKCH endoscopy suite joins a recent gift from an anonymous couple to create a dedicated Computerized Tomography (CT) suite in the first phase of the build-out of more comprehensive inpatient services. This phase will serve as the platform for Centers of Excellence—focused areas of practice designed to comprehensively address the severity and progression of chronic diseases that persist throughout the communities of South Los Angeles.