Area Hospital Jobs Targeted in County Plan : Finance: Supervisors will vote on deficit-shrinking proposal. Olive View, High Desert and four other facilities may be affected.

Olive View/UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar could lose more than 100 employees under a proposal to streamline Los Angeles County’s six hospitals and narrow a gaping budget deficit, while the staff of High Desert Hospital in Lancaster might experience transfers.

Many of the affected positions--both countywide and at Olive View--are expected to be obstetric nurses, prompted by a sharp drop in the number of deliveries over the last three years, county health officials disclosed last week.

Other targeted jobs include clerks and patient resource workers, who help the county’s often-indigent clients determine which benefits they are eligible for, according to a report submitted Friday to the Board of Supervisors.

The supervisors are scheduled to vote Tuesday on the Department of Health Services report, which calls for laying off 83 employees at Olive View and eliminating as many as 28 contract positions there.

Already, there is broad disagreement about how the proposal for transfers and layoffs will affect health care. Countywide, as many as 489 hospital workers could be affected at County/USC, Harbor/UCLA, Rancho Los Amigos and Martin Luther King/Drew as well as at Olive View and High Desert.

The union that represents most of the county’s 26,000 hospital and clinic workers says it would mean longer waits in emergency rooms. But the county health officials who crafted the proposal say it will simply make the hospitals leaner and more efficient.

“The problem is that our workload has been going down, and we thought it was going to (eventually) go back up,” said Donald Petite, the health department’s chief financial officer.

“We just couldn’t wait any longer. . . . The layoffs should not affect service.”

Transferred employees are likely to be shifted to departments where the patient load is growing, such as emergency rooms and intensive care services, Petite said.

About 100 hospital employees countywide would also be effectively demoted in a process the health department calls “cascading.” The measure would save money because demoted senior employees would suffer salary decreases and lower-level workers would in turn be laid off.

But while the department faces a $500-million budget deficit this fiscal year, the proposed staff reductions would save only about $4 million, according to the county’s figures.

Originally, the health department had called for more dramatic cuts: the elimination of 1,200 hospital jobs countywide, including 220 at Olive View and 12 at High Desert, the county’s smallest hospital.

Officials backed away from that proposal when they realized that the cuts were based on patient visits for the month of December, 1994, a month that is typically slow at hospitals, Petite said.

Representatives from the Los Angeles County Employees Assn. say any layoffs will hurt the hospital system, which treats 2,468 inpatients a day countywide.

“It’s not going to be a devastating, Draconian thing, but it’s going to further exacerbate the problem of longer waits for emergency rooms, intensive care and outpatient service,” said union spokesman Dan Savage.

“There’s still the same number of people out there who use the county for their primary care. We’re really worried that this is the first deliberate step of a death spiral for services for the county.”

Still, county officials say layoffs and so-called “right-sizing” would have been necessary anyway because the inpatient load at hospitals has decreased since the early 1990s.

Olive View, for instance, had an average of 322 patient visits daily in 1992-93, compared with 270 in December, 1994.

Melinda Anderson, Olive View’s chief executive officer, said she does not know what to expect if there are staff layoffs at her hospital.

“We are trying everything we can to make sure that there are no impacts,” Anderson said. “But at this point, we just don’t know yet.”

Although the hospital expanded its obstetrics staff a decade ago to meet the demand for more pregnancies, deliveries are now down at Olive View. The hospital filled an average of 93 maternity-ward beds a day in 1992-93, compared to a projected average of 62 beds daily this year.

Although the number of births has decreased, Anderson said, the need for gynecologists, cancer specialists and emergency room staff has increased.

“In the early 1990s we were doing so many deliveries, we probably weren’t doing much on the disease side,” Anderson said, referring to both prevention and treatment.

“What we need to be doing now is keying on women’s diseases, including breast cancer, and cancer and heart treatments for everyone. And our emergency room has been way over capacity too. We could use help in a lot of areas.”