Mary University Medical Center to Cut Jobs

More bad news is coming to workers of the health care field, as another health facility is getting ready to get rid of staff in order to fix the holes in their budget.

This time the bad news is coming to the staff of Mary University Medical Center in Lafayette, Louisiana. The cut of staff, which will impact the clinical staff, is being attributed to a cut in funding from the state. The cuts from the state are coming as an overall part of the cuts to the overall Louisiana state budget.

While no one is exactly certain who will be let go from the medical center, but they  notification were sent out, via email, to every member of the staff earlier in this week. The notices sent by email were not exactly layoff notices, they were more pre-warning notices that layoffs were coming in the future.

This news was not completely unexpected, as rumors of layoffs have been circulating around the campus for weeks now, it was still a bit of a surprise to a number of employees. One worker at the facility, Jignesh Petal, told a reporter for KATC news the following about the mood at the facility after the notices went out about the layoffs,  “I think the initial reaction was a shock and surprise. Most of us were not anticipating that there would be budget cuts.”

So, as you can imagine there is a lot of wondering about who is going to get the ax and who is going to stay in their jobs for the time being. We do know the following about the layoffs. The hospital administration was told that they have to cut about $4,000 from the budget each month, in order to make things work. This means that about four budgets will have their staffing cut. At the current moment there is no information about which departments will be cut from the budget at this time. The current word is that most of the workers in those target departments will be cut.

The same reporter for KATC sat down with the Hospital Administrator Larry Dorsey and said the following about the soon to be job cuts, “you think you are doing what you are supposed to and then you come in and have to have this huge cut of this magnitude, it’s really hard. For the community we are sorry they’ll be losing these services,” he said. “We are working hard to stop the elimination of the services.”

At the current moment both the hospital management and the administrators are looking for other ways to come up with the money needed to keep as many people in their jobs as possible, so the layoffs may be minimized by the time that these efforts are done.

The funding cuts are part of a larger effort by the state to cut hospital funding.  The state is hoping to cut down about 29 million dollars from the public hospital system this year in order to reduce its expenses.