Proceeds From Hospital Sale to Aid Community

A two-year fight over how to spend about $50 million from the sale of an Inglewood hospital is nearing an end, according to the nonprofit organization that will oversee the community windfall.

The California Community Foundation today will announce a court-approved plan for seeing that proceeds from the August 1996 sale of Centinela Hospital Medical Center to a for-profit chain are pumped into such community health programs as medical insurance for the indigent, as well as treatment, research and education.

Residents of Inglewood and parts of Hawthorne, Lennox, Los Angeles, El Segundo, Watts, Compton and Lawndale will be eligible for programs funded by the proceeds, as will 14 hospitals.

To avoid the bitterness that surrounded early plans for using the funds--which critics charged ignored community needs--fund administrators have created a six-member advisory board to make recommendations on grant applications. All of its members either live or work in the area served by the hospital.

In addition, the community foundation has been seeking ideas from community groups and has been studying assessments of needs and services made by area hospitals and county health officials. The advisory board is expected to begin taking applications for the funds early next year.

The funds “will materially and directly help thousands of people--especially the poor and the working poor--who live in the Inglewood-South Bay area,” said Jack Shakely, president of the foundation, which is a nonprofit, Los Angeles-based agency experienced in administering community charities.

Under the plan approved last month by the Los Angeles Superior Court, interest from the proceeds of the hospital sale will be distributed annually under two grant programs, one for hospitals serving local patients and one for community health projects.

Foundation officials estimate that $3 million will be available the first year. About $2 million from the Centinela Medical Community Fund will be used for grants to community health projects and facilities, and perhaps for medical plans for the uninsured. The remaining $1 million will enable selected hospitals to apply for grants to enhance their services.

The eligible hospitals, chosen because they serve area residents, include Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood and the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles.

Others are Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance, Los Angeles County King/Drew Medical Center in Willowbrook, Orthopaedic Hospital in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne, St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, UCLA Medical Center in Westwood and the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital in Los Angeles.

Cheryl Mendoza, who will oversee the Centinela grants programs for the California Community Foundation, said she believes the twin funds will “positively affect the lives and health of thousands of people.”

State law requires that whenever a nonprofit hospital is sold to a for-profit operator, the sale proceeds must be put into a trust fund and the earnings be spent on community health care. The state attorney general’s office and the courts must approve the spending plans.

In Inglewood, the board members who had run the hospital and its fund-raising arm before the sale aroused community suspicions with their early efforts to turn over responsibility for running the trust fund to the City of Hope, a renowned cancer research and treatment hospital in Duarte. Trustees then proposed spending half the money for a children’s health insurance program and splitting the rest among three local nonprofit hospitals.

But at the first public hearing on the funds in October 1997, several local officials and community activists blasted the trustees.

When trustees asked the California Community Foundation to take over, Mendoza said, the foundation held a series of meetings with community leaders to help it determine how to proceed.

Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn said Friday he is “pleased with the approach.”

“I am just pleased that the working poor will have an opportunity to receive the type of medical care that they deserve,” Dorn said.