After shutting down eight years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles has set a date to reopen in June with a new lease on life, according to the L.A. Times.
Since closing nearly a decade ago, the healthcare landscape has shifted to focus on preventative care. For instance, the facility no longer has a trauma center because most people who visited the emergency room did so for psychiatric illnesses. Instead, the hospital opened an urgent care psychiatric center last year.
The facility also expanded an outpatient clinic and a public health center where patients can get immunizations and STD testing to meet another need in the community.
The new facility — housed in a tower of the old hospital — will include 131 beds, far fewer than the 450 beds it used to have because inpatient stays at California hospitals have mostly dropped over the past several years. It will also offer fewer medical specialties than before and will no longer have a trauma center in its emergency room, according to the report.
This fall, a recuperative care facility for patients who need a long-term place to recover from an illness is set to open as well.