County to Aid Nurse Students : Health: Scholarships require them to work in area hospitals upon graduation. Dissenters call raises for existing employees a better idea.

Faced with a severe shortage of nurses in facilities that are being overwhelmed by indigent patients, the Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to award scholarships of up to $20,000 to nursing students who agree to work at Los Angeles County hospitals after graduation.

The $700,000 program was approved on a 3-2 vote with supervisors Deane Dana, Kenneth Hahn and Mike Antonovich supporting it. Dissenting were supervisors Gloria Molina and Ed Edelman, who criticized Antonovich for naming the program after himself--”the Michael D. Antonovich Nursing Faculty Grant Program.”

Under the program, the county will offer 40 annual scholarships of $5,000 to $20,000. In return, the nursing students must promise to work in county hospitals for four to seven years, depending on the amount of their scholarship.

Additionally, the county will award 10 grants of $50,000 to nursing schools in Los Angeles County to help them hire more teachers. The schools will be required to increase enrollment by 20 students for each newly hired teacher.

County Health Director Robert Gates told the supervisors that the program will help to relieve the nursing shortage at county hospitals, which largely serve the poor.

Nursing shortages have affected public and private hospitals across the nation, and the huge Los Angeles County health-care system has been especially hard hit because of the tougher conditions under which nurses must work. The crowded and aging facilities often are filled with severely ill patients and are the scenes of sporadic violence.

The county already offers scholarships of up to $2,000 for students who attend the county-run Los Angeles County Medical Center School of Nursing, said Carolyn McDermott, director of the county office of nursing affairs. Students there must promise to work for three years at a county health facility in exchange for the scholarships.

The new program expands the scholarships to students attending the 25 nursing schools in Los Angeles County and increases the stipend to cover tuition at four-year schools. Scholarship recipients who fail to graduate will be required to repay the county.

In opposing the program, Edelman and Molina argued that the county should instead spend the money on improving salaries and working conditions for the 4,500 nurses who work at the county’s six hospitals and more than a dozen clinics.

The recently adopted $12-billion county budget provides no pay raise for the nurses, whose contracts expire Sept. 30.

“We ought to put resources into keeping nurses rather than trying to recruit them and then have them leave,” Edelman said. He complained that the county already is spending about $1 million on a nationwide advertising campaign to recruit nurses.

McDermott said county nurses have received a 17% pay raise over the last two years. She added that the county also has taken a number of steps to improve working conditions for nurses, such as beefing up security at hospitals.

Edelman called Antonovich’s naming of the legislation after himself “self-serving.” While county buildings, parks and trails are named after board members, the supervisors said it was the first time they could recall a supervisor affixing his name to county legislation.

Antonovich responded by pointing to the Edmund D. Edelman Health Center in Hollywood.

Antonovich modeled the scholarship program after the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which provides scholarships to college students in return for a commitment to serve in the armed forces.

Dana said he thought that naming the legislation after Antonovich was a good idea. “Maybe,” he said, “it will give the rest of us an incentive to do something good.”