COUNTY DOCTORS OK UNION REPRESENTATION IN ELECTION.

Byline: Douglas Haberman Daily News Staff Writer

Los Angeles County-employed doctors voted by a margin of 65 percent to 35 percent for union representation in the nation's largest such election for physicians in 18 years, officials said Friday.

The vote in favor of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists was 341-182, said Louise Perry, secretary for the county Employee Relations Commission. Of 795 eligible doctors, 523 cast valid ballots.

Union officials were ebullient. ``The numbers are quite extraordinary,'' said Joe Bader, UAPD regional administrator, after a celebratory news conference at Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center.

As a result of the vote, a bargaining unit representing county-employed doctors will negotiate an employment contract with the county this year, union officials said.

Union officials said the vote gives the county a new ally in its efforts to obtain federal funding for health care services, mostly for the indigent.

It should also benefit patients, if gradually, said Dr. Dan Lawlor, coordinator of physician organizing for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who worked on the campaign with the UAPD.

Negotiations between the doctors' bargaining unit and the county eventually should lead to shorter waits to see doctors and less-hurried visits with them, he said.

``It's already a very good system,'' Lawlor said. ``Let's make it better.''

Dr. Orlando Pile, chief of communicable diseases for the Sheriff's Department-run jails, said the approximately 25 physicians in the department want the county to keep them informed about raises and to have some say about working hours and time to continue their medical education.

The county Department of Health Services official who oversees physicians was less than enthusiastic about the vote's outcome. ``I can't say that I'm particularly excited about it one way or the other,'' said Dr. Donald Thomas, the department's associate director.

He was also skeptical about the ability of the union to win more power or influence for doctors.

``I don't know if they're going to have any more say than they have now,'' he said. ``A lot of doctors, when they say they want to have a say, they mean they want to tell you what to do.''

Thomas said the union at times was dishonest in its arguments to doctors, claiming the county is trying to privatize some of their jobs, for example, when that isn't the case. Bader said the union ran a clean campaign.

Asked about the possibility of county doctors ever striking, the Oakland-based union's executive director, Gary Robinson, said the union has the right to call a strike but it never has done so in its 27-year history.

``There are so many other tools'' the union can use, he said, including public pressure.

Lawlor said the union isn't looking for budget-busting salary increases for county doctors. ``We don't want to run the county into a deficit,'' he said.

The doctors earn between $85,000 and $135,000 a year.

Among the top changes the doctors probably will seek from the county, union officials said, are a reduction in the number of patients they must see per hour or per day and an expansion of the support staff, from nurses to X-ray technicians to secretaries.

Dr. Kitridou Rodonthi, a 24-year county veteran in internal medicine and rheumatology, said secretarial staffing at County/USC has been insufficient since the Department of Health Services' 1995 fiscal crisis led to severe layoffs.

``I do everything by myself - and that on an antiquated computer,'' she said. ``This system is surviving because of (doctors') tenacity and nothing else.''