At capacity, Martin Luther King Jr Community Healthcare’s three expanded business units will allow the hospital to serve almost 80k patients with 126k visits. The Project will create 66 full-time equivalent jobs and retain 1,958, of which 50% are filled by local residents and 43% will be accessible to low-income persons possessing a high school diploma or less.
Martin Luther King Jr Community Healthcare is aligned with UACD’s racial equity and inclusion goals – 20.7% of patients are African American and 72.2% are Hispanic or Latino; during the project’s construction phase, at least 30% of subcontracting, procurement, and professional service contracts to minorities; and at least 50% of the hospital’s employees and governing board members are minorities.
Urban Action Community Development (UACD) deployed $8.75MM in Round 18 NMTC allocation to the Martin Luther King Jr Community Healthcare (MLKCH and Hospital) located in the heart of South Los Angeles and adjacent to the Watts community. The safety net hospital founded in 2015 has a mission to “provide compassionate, collaborative, quality care, and improve the health of our community”. MLKCH has grown from being a stand-alone 131-bed hospital to becoming an integrated health system and the primary source of high-quality healthcare for South LA residents. Federal data indicates that South LA has a shortage of 1,400 doctors, and the physician gap is dominated by the lack of specialty care. To address these long-standing health and social inequities, MLKCH focuses on the continuum of care. The NMTC financing will support the following three capital improvement projects – (i) expansion of the Emergency Department (ED) with eight new exam rooms; (ii) completion of the Interventional Radiology and Cardiac Laboratory Suite that will have the capacity to perform 750 procedures annually; and (iii) construction of a new Acute Psychiatric Stabilization Unit (APS Unit or Empath Suite) with 16 observation beds and 12 acute chairs. The NMTC investment will be used to continue fighting health vulnerabilities devastating Black and Brown communities.
