KING/DREW PHARMACY RECORDS POORLY ORGANIZED, AUDIT FINDS.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Record-keeping was so bad in the outpatient pharmacy at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center that county auditors scrutinizing the reports could not tell whether shortfalls and surpluses of 45 different drugs were caused by thefts or just bad accounting.

``We could not determine whether the inventory discrepancies were caused by an actual loss of drugs or by record-keeping errors. The control situation was such that drugs could have been lost or taken without detection,'' says the March 29 report that the Los Angeles County Auditor-Controller sent to the Board of Supervisors.

``That happens sometimes, the records are so bad that you can't come to an opinion,'' Assistant Auditor-Controller Tyler McCauley said. ``The only thing you can do is fix things so they don't happen again.''

The audit credited hospital officials with moving quickly to fix the problems once they were discovered, but said more needs to be done.

King-Drew Chief Operating Officer Randall Foster said hospital officials are implementing many of the suggestions, and will replace a much-criticized computer pharmacy inventory system next fall.

``The auditor went back 14 years looking at the ins and outs and decided that really the only way to fix this was to start over,'' Foster said. ``That's what we're doing.''

Foster said the discrepancies were reported two weeks ago to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, estimating the missing drugs were worth about $2,500.

Though Foster said he could not recall which of the 45 drugs were controlled substances, he estimated fewer than six types of drugs had some street value.

DEA Special Agent Ralph Lochridge said he did not know whether the report had been received or acted upon.

The audit blamed the shortfall on the failure by pharmacy workers to compare actual hand counts of pills with computerized inventory records, allowing discrepancies to build for years.