Panel Urges Olive View Child Abuse Center : Social services: A medical team at the Sylmar facility could examine suspected victims from the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

A countywide council on child abuse recommended Wednesday that a medical team be established at Olive View Medical Center to examine children from the San Fernando, Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys thought to be victims of sexual abuse.

The recommendation by the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect will be forwarded to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a decision.

Currently, alleged victims of child abuse from those areas must travel at least as far as Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, near downtown Los Angeles, to be examined by specially trained medical personnel. Waiting lists there and at other hospitals with similar teams are four to six weeks long, said the council’s executive director, Deanne Tilton.

“They are all coming to us, and we just can’t handle them,” said Astrid Heger, director of the pediatric sexual abuse program at County-USC.

Heger estimated that between a third and half of the 700 patients she sees annually come from the three valleys.

As proposed by the council, the Olive View team would include a full-time doctor, a nurse and a social worker trained in recognizing and documenting sexual abuse of children.

Tilton estimated that the team could cost up to $300,000 a year. But she said it will save the county money now spent on such things as housing suspected child abuse victims taken from their families who later turn out not to have been abused and on re-evaluations of children who receive inadequate examinations by untrained local doctors.

L.A. County Sheriff Sherman Block, who serves as chairman of the council, said setting up a Valley team would also save money now spent on dispatching deputies to transport the alleged victims to County-USC, UCLA and Harbor Hills hospitals.

“But most of all, there’s a human cost here--the additional trauma to the child being transported across town,” Block said. “There are some things that you really can’t put a value on.”

In 1991, the council received approval from the Board of Supervisors to hire a doctor to work half time at Olive View. But there were no takers, Tilton and Heger said, because doctors who looked into it realized the workload was far greater than a part-time job.

“When they went out there and looked at the volume, they all said, ‘I’ll work half time on examinations alone . . . and then end up going to court to testify on my own time,’ ” Heger said.