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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13-NOVEMBER 19 , 2023
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VOL. 11,
NO. 146
LA County agencies awarded $1.7M to support trauma care, information sharing By City News Service
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pair of grants totaling more than $1.7 million were awarded to Los Angeles County health agencies in support of programs designed to improve emergency medical care and treatment of trauma patients in the field, county officials announced Wednesday. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the state Office of Traffic Safety awarded a grant of just over $1 million to county Emergency Medical Services, Harbor-UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine and the Lundquist Institute. The money is earmarked for the development and implementation of a mobile app that can be accessed by paramedics and medical technicians in the field who respond to traumatic injuries, such as car crash patients. The app is expected to provide personnel with more rapid access to medical treatment protocols in hopes it will lead to improved realtime decision-making in the field.
American Medical Response ambulance. | Photo by MargaretNapier CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED
“For patients with severe trauma, immediate care on scene by paramedics is critical to their survival and recovery,” Dr. Nichole Bosson, Los Angeles County EMS Agency medical director, said in a statement.
“This grant will place the most up-to-date, evidencebased practices into the hands of our EMS clinicians, quite literally, via a mobile application.” County officials said information on essential
treatment protocols are currently accessible through a county EMS Agency website, but the mobile app will make the information more readily available. Meanwhile, the state Office of Traffic Safety
also awarded the same three agencies a separate $700,902 grant to support a Health Data Exchange System, billed as an electronic data-sharing effort that is also expected to help improve trauma care.
“There’s currently no mechanism for capturing outcome data of all injured patients transported by EMS in Los Angeles County. This grant will facilitate realtime data sharing, which we can use to inform proactive measures to prevent injury, as well as to improve the field care for those patients injured in L.A. County,” Richard Tadeo, Los Angeles County EMS Agency director, said in a statement. The HDE system will streamline the current manual system of collecting outcome data for trauma patients, officials said. “HDE will not only capture injury patterns, it will also provide data that public health entities, municipalities, and law enforcement can draw from to develop solutions to prevent common traffic crashes and pedestrian injuries,” according to the county Department of Health Services. Funding for both grants was provided through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Investigation into alleged ethics violations by Councilman Lee moves forward By Jose Herrera, City News Service
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os Angeles’ Ethics Commission Wednesday authorized staff to contract with the state Office of Administrative Hearings to provide an administrative law judge to serve as a hearing officer for the investigation of Councilman John Lee. The commission has contracted with the state office for hearing officers since 2004, according to a report from David Tristan, the commission’s executive director.
The commission voted 3-0 to direct staff to finalize an agreement with President Jeffery Daar recusing himself to avoid “any appearance of a conflict of interest,” he said. Daar and Lee were among the 16 candidates in the 2019 special election to fill the vacant 12th District City Council seat following the resignation of Mitchell Englander to take a job with the Oak View Group, a global sports and entertainment advisory, development and investment company.
Enforcement Officer Kenneth Hardy explained Wednesday that the commission only decided on hearing officers for an evidentiary hearing, which he described as “somewhat like a trial.” Hardy said that during this procedure evidence is brought forward, witnesses may be examined and crossexamined, and sometimes objections are made. The individual administrative hearing officer will make a recommendation whether the alleged viola-
tions occurred, then provide a written report with factual findings, conclusions of law and a summary of the evidence. Per the report, the OAH in-person filing fee is $125 per case and the hourly rate for administrative law judges is $369. OAH typically schedules the city’s hearings two to six months after a case is filed, but the timeline depends on the facts of the matter whether a case may be extended, officials said. The hearing should take a
day, according to the report. Members of the Ethics Commission must then determine whether the alleged violations actually did occur and, if so, what penalty is appropriate. The commissioners had three other options for an administrative hearing officer, in which one commissioner could have served as the hearing officer; commission members could have sat in as a hearing panel with another individual presiding as the hearing officer; or
commission members could have sat in as a hearing panel without the presence of a presiding hearing officer. Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Lee is accused of violating governmental ethics laws for allegedly accepting and failing to report excessive gifts, including some received during a trip to Las Vegas in 2017 he took along See John Lee Page 28