Creating Access and Hope

Couple Gives $2.8 Million to Expand Hospital's Inpatient Services

For people with chronic health issues such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, accessing timely diagnosis and treatment when their conditions worsen can have profound, life-changing—even life-saving—benefits.

In South Los Angeles, the need for such services is great, and the lack of local availability takes a dramatic toll. To date, 36% of the patients discharged from Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital have one or more of those high-risk health indicators. For some, the lack of early treatment can be devastating—the hospital performs an average of one amputation each week.

Thanks to an anonymous couple who gave $2.8 million in February 2016 to help MLKCH expand inpatient services, the hospital has purchased a second CT scanner and created a dedicated Computerized Tomography (CT) Suite, enabling our doctors to offer procedures that range from preventing unnecessary amputations—an outcome of the chronic conditions so common among our patients—to early detection and treatment of cardiovascular disease. With the addition of interventional radiology, the CT Suite will also provide patients with diagnosis and treatment of various cancers and benign tumors.

In expanding inpatients services at the hospital and adding outpatient services for adults with complex chronic conditions through its Advanced Care Program initiative, the hospital fulfills its promise to provide access to the preventive and life-saving treatments our community needs.

It was this detailed vision for making people's lives better and increasing community-based access to healthcare that motivated the couple to make their gift to the hospital. They explain:

“We were inspired to make this gift by the opportunity to help improve the physical health conditions of the South Los Angeles community. We were particularly interested in empowering those who seek health services locally and through their community who might not otherwise have access to such services. The dedication of the staff and leadership of MLKCH to community health is truly cohesive, effective, and inspiring."

To recognize the potential their gift has to help people prevent or overcome chronic health conditions, the donors offered a powerful suggestion: adding the word 'hope' to the MLKCH Emergency Department. “In many ways the ED is the ‘front door’ of the hospital, and 'hope' conveys the spirit of what our donors want to offer to every patient who walks in that door," says Dyan Sublett, president of the MLK Community Health Foundation.

"All of us at MLKCH have a dream for a healthy, vibrant South Los Angeles," Dyan says. "'Hope' is a word that reflects that dream. We’re so proud to have donors who want to create it. It’s our own hope that others will join them.”

A dedication of the new Hope Emergency Center at MLKCH is in the planning stage.