INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The owner of a hospital has agreed to pay $125,000 in penalties and charitable contributions as a settlement in a lawsuit by the Los Angeles city attorney. Four years ago, Centinela Freeman Regional Medical Center’s Inglewood campus dumped a patient with chronic lung problems at a homeless shelter without following proper discharge procedures.
Centinela Freeman no longer owns the Inglewood hospital, but it owns the Marina del Rey Hospital. The settlement will be enforced at the Marina del Rey campus, the Los Angeles Times reports. Centinela Freeman Holdings is the most recent hospital group to be pursued by the city attorney for incorrectly disposing of patients at homeless shelters.
The patient, who was left at the temporary winter shelter at West Los Angeles Armory, was discovered by authorities in February 2007. She was carrying an oxygen cylinder.
The hospital group has agreed to pay $5,000 in civil penalties and $120,000 in charitable contributions to a homeless recovery network. It has also agreed to an injunction that would prevent it from discharging homeless patients to the street or any shelter within a “patient safety zone” – an area in downtown and South Los Angeles where most of the region’s homeless shelter and missions are located.
Since 2006, police have discovered hundreds of incidents of patient dumping. The Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles has even installed video surveillance equipment outside its shelter to capture incidents of patient dumping.
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