New West Health Services Cuts Jobs

The face of health care is changing, at least for its workers. Some of you may remember when people in the medical field were considered to have some of the most stable jobs out there, right after professions like the fire fighters and police officers. Well it looks like the tide is turning as the long-term effects of the bank crashes have impacted all sectors of the economy.

This time the company to get the cuts is the New West Health Services. The company is getting ready to cut about 15 workers, nine workers from their facility in Helena and another six from the facility in Kalispell, in order to change its focus. The company is switching over to what is knows as a Medicare-focused health plan. These cuts will leave the company with a total of 70 workers.

The company will be providing these workers with some severance pay, though the company did not go into to much detail about how long that would last for the workers. The company will also give the workers assistance in finding new positions where they can, though they will not be filling positions in their own organization. In order to cut back on the number of layoffs that the company had to make for this  transition they have been practicing attrition for the last six to nine months, depending on the department in question.
Of course these cuts seem small when they are compared to some of the other hospital cuts made in the past couple of months across the nation. For those of you missed out on some of our earlier coverage here is a look at some significantly more devastating cuts to a health care provider:

“The Jackson Memorial, a major South Florida hospital has informed that in order to save millions of dollars, it’s going to lay off thousands of workers.

Admirable mentality. With Japan as an example of what skilled human workers can do to raise a nation’s economy without adequate land mass or resources, our decision makers think economic growth is a result of human resource culling and throttling – or they seem to think something quite similar to that if one sees the number of firefighters, law enforcement officers, teachers, and hospital workers given the boot every day, all in the name of saving and reinforcing the economy.

Well, back to the news, as the story goes, the President and CEO of Jackson Health System Carlos Migoya officially announced the cuts on Tuesday at a press conference. He said, “This is not about a profit and loss, this is about efficiency … What we’re looking to do at this point is right-sizing the organization, so we have the right number of employees for the kind of volumes that we have.”

Already 195 positions have been eliminated (one would like to say ‘compromised’ in the language of Frederick Forsythe), and 920 are in the pipeline amounting to 1,115 jobs. This would mean that Jackson Memorial had been overstaffed by 10% all along.

Jackson’s representatives confirmed that the cuts would create a savings of $69 million including the savings in benefits.”