Nursing School to Be Built at Olive View Center : Medical services: The county hopes the Sylmar training facility, due to open in October, will ease the chronic staff shortages at the overburdened hospital.

A nursing school that is intended to alleviate a shortage of nurses at the county’s Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar is to be built on the hospital grounds in the next six months, under a contract approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

County officials and hospital administrators hope that the school will create a steady supply of nurses-in-training and newly graduated nurses familiar with Olive View.

“Our patients come from all over the world, with diseases and life conditions that are quite unique,” said Maple Gray, assistant administrator at Olive View. “We feel that if these students are exposed to our unique environment, they may be convinced to stay.”

Patient loads at Olive View have soared dramatically in recent years, especially in the maternity ward. Private hospitals offer lighter workloads and, in some cases, higher salaries than Olive View, making it difficult for the public hospital to recruit enough nurses. As a result, temporary nurses, who are hired from private agencies, have been used to fill some of the more than 800 nursing-related jobs at the hospital, Gray said.

Although the temporary nurses are fully trained, she said they are often unfamiliar with the hospital’s procedures and are about one-third more expensive than permanent staff nurses.

The school, which will cost $1.3 million to build, will include classrooms, demonstration rooms, a library and a laboratory in a prefabricated modular structure. It will offer training for 230 students for jobs as licensed vocational nurses, registered nurses and nurse anesthetists.

Most of the construction costs will be financed through funds controlled by the county Productivity and Innovation Commission, said Kathryn Barger, an aide for health issues to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose 5th District includes Olive View. The commission was created to improve services and save money. It doles out loans, which must be repaid from program savings within three to five years.

Barger said savings realized by hiring fewer temporary nurses and using the nurses-in-training for some duties will be sufficient to repay the fund.

The school for licensed vocational nurses already exists and will move to the hospital grounds from its current headquarters at the Lake View Medical Center, which is in Lake View Terrace.

The RN and nurse anesthetist programs will be operated as satellites of the county’s 500-student nursing school at County-USC Medical Center, said Carolyn McDermott, the county director of nursing affairs.