Hollywood Hospitals

It's a sad fact that over the past decade, many hospitals in L.A. have closed due to lack of funding, particulary those that offered trauma care. Ambulances must travel farther to transport patients who may have only minutes to live.

At the same time, medical dramas on TV have never been more popular, and even medical oriented comedies have sprung up. The irony is that while the populace finds hospital shows ever more fascinating, they cannot find it within themselves to support the real thing that might save their lives.

The best proof is to look at what has happened to some of those hospitals that have shut their doors to patients. They have reopened them for the filming of TV shows based around the lives and loves of medical personnel and their patients.

There are at least three former hospitals that I know of that offer full-time care to medical shows. A visit to one of these facilities is, to say the least, creepy. Enter the lobby, and you'll find magazines on the tables, a reception area stocked with forms, telephones, computers. The signs will welcome you to the hospital, direct you to various departments, warn that your actions are being monitored on CCTV. The gift shop has stuffed animals, USA Today and the Times, candy bars and get-well cards. Only the fact that there is no staff, no patients, no background noise from conversation, nor wheel chairs and carts squeeking through the halls makes one uneasy.

Pass the big double doors, and there are the nurse's stations and patient rooms. The pharmacy is stocked with (empty) packages of drugs. Emergency rooms, surgeries, even the morgue are all available for film crews. Gurneys and portable X-ray machines sit in the halls. Charts lie on counters, seemingly ready for review.

Flip open one of those charts and you might be surprised to find that they are real. Most date back a quarter-century, but inside there is real information on real people. They are not from the hospital's days as a operational facility; instead they have been purchased from other sources to act as set dressing.

There have been medical dramas on television almost from the day television was born. Until recently, all were shot on sound stages, and a few still do, the most notably "ER," filmed on the Warner Bros. lot. But in the economics of the entertainment industry, it's often easier to rent a real location than create one on a stage. Enter the real, live, dead hospital.

Now, I suppose it is the right of whoever owns these abandoned medical centers to use it as they see fit, and it should come as no surprise that Hollywood is eager to take advantage of our region's inability to provide decent health care.

But: has it occurred to anybody that about 12 million people in southern California are sitting on a gridwork of active earthquake faults? That sooner or later, "the big one" is going to hit, and we'll be needing every hosptial bed we can find?

While these old hospitals may look like they could be drafted into service on a moment's notice, it's far from the truth. They're not the least bit sterile, for one thing. The equipment, all neatly displayed for the camera, is inoperative. No oxygen, no medicine, not even running water in the rooms. There's an old joke that goes, "I'm not a doctor; I just play one on TV". As it turns out, these former hospitals just play one on TV, too.

I wish someone would wake up and decide that if we can mothball aircraft carriers for future national need, we can do the same with hospitals we can't fund. We don't know if we'll ever fight a big enough war where we'll need another aircraft carrier, but we do know "the big one" is coming. Invest some of that "homeland security" money on something other than traffic cameras. And maybe, TV can do what it does best, recreating reality, back on sound stages again.