2 South Bay Hospitals Pioneer in Curing Workers’ Child Care Ills

Pam Stahl, a part-time worker at Little Company of Mary Hospital, used to pay a baby sitter $5 an hour to care for her two small children in her Torrance home.

Now, on the 2 1/2 days a week that Stahl works in the Torrance hospital’s employee relations office, she takes advantage of a new benefit for hospital staffers and saves money by having her children, 1 and 3 years old, cared for just 5 blocks away at Discoveryland Child Care Center, where the hospital reserves places for the children of its staff.

Stahl prefers the new arrangement because it costs her less, she feels more secure having her children so close, and the children can stay as late as 7 p.m., when Discoveryland closes, without extra charge.

“It’s wonderful,” Stahl said last week, as children sang, cut a ribbon and released balloons to officially mark a new role for the already-established Discoveryland. A component of the Seventh-day Adventist South Bay Junior Academy, which educates children through the 10th grade, it has essentially become a day care center for children of Little Company employees with the cost partly paid by the hospital.

Under a cooperative arrangement with Little Company in Torrance, the Adventist academy more than doubled the capacity of its day care center and added services for infants. Of the 53 spaces, 41 are reserved for children of hospital employees.

The new venture makes the hospital the second in the South Bay to provide child care for employees. Centinela Hospital in Inglewood was the pioneer, opening a care center on hospital grounds in April, 1982. It now has 70 children, divided almost equally among infants and preschoolers.

According to child care experts, the two hospitals are the only employers in the South Bay that directly provide regular day care for employees, although some others assist workers in finding care and offer financial assistance.

Growing Trend

The service is part of a trend that was foreign to businesses not too many years ago, but is now rising on the list of benefits that workers want most. And it is a natural for hospitals--which have large numbers of nurses and female employes who work irregular and sometimes long hours--to be leading the way.

“Child care is the fastest-growing employee benefit around,” said Sandy Burud, president of Summa Associates, a Pasadena child care benefit planning firm that is Little Company’s child care consultant. Nationally, she said, only about 100 companies offered child care a decade ago. Now, about 5,000 do.

“Hospitals are among the leaders because of their scheduling needs,” Burud said. “Nurses leave hospital work to work in doctors’ offices so they can work regular hours.”

The Centinela and Little Company programs grew out of a need to solve recruitment and morale problems directly related to difficulty employees were having finding good child care. “A year and a half ago, we did an employee survey, and the overwhelming need was for child care,” said Joan Juarez, Little Company’s human resources coordinator, who has her 4-year-old son at Discoveryland. She said it was financially prohibitive for the hospital to build its own center, so it surveyed existing ones and chose Discoveryland.

Related Problems

The survey revealed that significant numbers of employees had difficulty finding child care, which resulted in tardiness, absenteeism and stress.

“Ninety percent of our employees are female,” said Scott Goodwin, human resources director of Little Company, which has about 1,300 employees. “It is an atmosphere that needs child care.”

The Seventh-day Adventist academy and the hospital entered into an agreement in which the hospital guarantees a specific number of children to the center and subsidizes a portion of the cost, paying 45 cents an hour for infant care. Employees pay $2 an hour for infant care and $15 a day for older preschoolers. Little Company also gave $4,000 worth of equipment to the school. The hospital program for 1988-89 has an $80,000 budget for the program.

Susan Vlach, principal of the church academy, said the school was attracted to the project as a community service and “Christian outreach.” Among care center activities are Bible study and prayer.

Nursing Shortage

The Centinela Hospital program resulted from a nursing shortage in the late 1970s, said Lorraine Schrag, who has been director of the day care center since it opened. “The hospital discovered there were a lot of licensed nurses who weren’t working because they had child care problems,” she said. Opening the center allowed the hospital to recruit the nurses it needed, she added.

Because of the demand for space, she said the hospital gives priority to patient-care workers who are difficult to recruit: physical therapists, radiology technicians and nurses.

Employees pay $100 a week for infants--”including diapers and baby food,” Schrag says--and $70 a week for preschoolers.

Schrag said the hospital needs “committed and dedicated” workers who are not distracted by worries about their children. “The child care center provides an opportunity to achieve this.”

Goodwin, of Little Company, similarly commented that even employees who do not have children favored starting the program, because they were affected by the “absenteeism, stress and problems affecting work performances” of parents with child care problems.

While it does not have a full-care program for children of employees, Torrance Memorial Hospital has a day care program for mildly ill children. Helping employees was a factor in launching it three years ago, said program director Charlene Cottrell. She said an average of seven children a day are cared for, 20% of them children of hospital employees. Job-seekers are told of the service as an employment benefit, and Cottrell said “it has helped recruitment.”

Torrance Program

The city of Torrance is developing a day care program for city workers and employees of local businesses, which would help support it. No start date has been set. Lael Walz, a recreation supervisor who heads a city child care study team, said the aim is to provide for 75 infants and preschoolers. A possible location is a building at Greenwood Park, which is a former school site the city acquired, she said.

Aside from the financial advantage of partial subsidy for infant child care costs, Goodwin of Little Company said Discoveryland assures Little Company workers of care “in a real top-quality place that is underwritten and backed by the hospital. (Employees) can go there at lunch.”

To accommodate the arrangement with Little Company, Discoveryland received new licensing from the state Department of Social Services, increasing the number of preschoolers it could care for, and permitting care of infants aged 6 weeks to 2 years. The 17 infant spaces are reserved for hospital employees, as well as 24 of the 36 spaces for preschoolers. The remaining 12 preschool spaces are for the public.

Officials at Discoveryland and Centinela say offering infant care is especially beneficial because it is more expensive and more difficult to find than care for older children. Infant care usually is provided in state-licensed private homes, not child care centers that have educational programs.

As of October, there were only 393 licenses in the state for care centers accepting infants, contrasted to 7,653 serving preschoolers, according to the state Social Services Department.

Tailored to Profession

The two hospital centers are open weekdays and have hours tailored to hospital life: Discoveryland operates from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Centinela from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. “Most employees that work here are part time or on 12-hour shifts,” said Juarez of Little Company. She said the day care operation works for employees because it is flexible, offering longer hours and infant care on an hourly basis, and parents don’t have to pay for care on days they do not work.

The August, 1987, survey at Little Company that led to the care program was answered by 763 of the then-1,400 employees. Two hundred and seventy seven had children aged 15 or younger, 116 planned to have children and 19 were then expecting.

According to Goodwin, 82% of the 277 parents reported problems with child care, including difficulty finding convenient care by qualified care givers that also provided for children on days they were ill.

Goodwin said more than one-third of the 277 parents said they had seriously considered quitting their jobs because of child care difficulties. About 44% of the 763 employee who responded said they knew someone who would apply or work at the hospital if child care were available.

Summa Associates President Burud said: “There is an interruption of work occurring because people don’t have adequate care. They can’t get to work, or they miss work because the sitter does not show up. At work, they have interruptions because the kids are home alone and are calling, or they are worried because their children have been left in marginal care situations.”