Supervisors Act : Fund-Raising Foundation for Olive View OKd

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved formation of the Olive View Medical Center Foundation, a nonprofit, private organization designed to raise funds for the hospital. Olive View officials say private funds are needed to turn their little-known county hospital into a major medical teaching facility.

The officials said they will use the scheduled March opening of the new $120-million Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar to publicize the potential services that can be provided by a county hospital in the San Fernando Valley.

Long-range goals for the foundation include raising $4 million for construction of an auditorium for medical-student teaching and public health education courses, and possibly a health science museum, said Dr. Irwin Ziment, chief of medicine at the hospital and president of the foundation.

In the short term, officials hope to raise $50,000 to help fund bilingual health education programs and career counseling for youths interested in health-related fields, Ziment said. The foundation also will contribute to research in areas such as the effects of air pollution, diseases that affect breathing and communicable diseases that affect the public health, such as tuberculosis and hepatitis, he said.

Striving for Excellence

“We are going to go out to the community and say, ‘Look, we are a teaching hospital built at great public expense, but we want to be more than just another county hospital; we want to be an excellent teaching hospital,’ ” Ziment said.

“The way are are going to do that is to add on to the basic hospital by forming an additional thrust to our activity: research and education.”

Since the original 888-bed Olive View Medical Center was destroyed in the Sylmar earthquake on Feb. 9, 1971, the hospital has been located at Van Nuys’ Mid-Valley Hospital, a 120-bed facility that was purchased by the county in 1972 for use pending the rebuilding of Olive View.

In 1973 the hospital became affiliated with UCLA Medical School as a teaching facility. Currently there are 10 full-time physicians at the hospital with professorial status at UCLA, Ziment said.

But the cramped quarters and lack of research facilities have made it difficult to attract physicians and researchers, he said.

“The view we are taking is that Olive View has been around for 65 years and had a very unfortunate history that condemned us to live in a tiny hospital in Van Nuys,” Ziment said.

“We feel we can’t be content just to move from Olive View in Van Nuys to Olive View in Sylmar. When we move to the new hospital in Sylmar, we will have a potentially wonderful campus for health care and research that the people in this Valley can be proud of. Right now nobody knows we exist.”

The Olive View Foundation will be modeled after a foundation at the county’s Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, said Irving H. Cohen, assistant director of administration and finance for the county Department of Health Services. Both foundations are taking a private-sector approach to fund raising by forming a board of directors made up of celebrities and community leaders who lend their names to the cause, Cohen said.

Tuesday’s approval of the nonprofit corporation at Olive View allows the foundation to operate independently of the Board of Supervisors, Cohen said, meaning that business decisions and actions such as equipment donations to the facility will not require approval of the supervisors.

Since its incorporation in mid-1984, the Rancho Los Amigos Hospital has raised about $100,000, mainly through small donations from individuals, according to Bernice Kellar, acting executive director of the foundation.

“It has started slowly,” Kellar said, “but we haven’t had a major event yet. It simply takes time to get established.”

The Olive View Foundation has scheduled a $150-a-plate banquet at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel in Universal City April 5 to kick off its campaign.

Olive View physicians and employees have already donated about $10,000 to the foundation, according to Richard Codova, associate administrator of the hospital.

The four other county hospitals have attracted private money through other fund-raising methods, Cohen said, including physician- and staff-initiated drives.

“The need is clearly there,” Cohen said. “It is obvious that in the last five years government support is dwindling. For us to survive and maintain our services we have to do something to generate funds. The way to do it could be through these type of foundations.”

But the hospital officials admitted that they are uncertain how the call for donations for a public facility will be answered by the private sector.

Cohen said the foundation will have to fight the perception that a county hospital should be solely supported by the government. “We have to at least make an attempt to raise money or we will see a deterioration of our facilities,” he said.

Codova said donations will “depend on the public consciousness. We treat everybody. Private hospitals don’t treat people who can’t pay.”