Novant Health to Cut 289 Jobs

In the early days of this lengthy economic downturn jobs in health care were seen as stable and for some time they were. After things had been going wrong in the economy for a long time the jobs in health care started to trickle down.  Health care facilities all over the nation are facing a decrease in payment, an increase in charity care that is leading to a cut back in the way that reduces their staff.

One such facility that is feeling the squeeze of the budget is Novant Health. For those of you who have never heard of Novant Health here is a look at how the company has chosen to describes itself, “Novant Health is a not-for-profit integrated system of 13 hospitals and a medical group consisting of 1,124 physicians in 355 clinic locations, as well as numerous outpatient surgery centers, medical plazas, rehabilitation programs, diagnostic imaging centers and community health outreach programs. Novant’s 25,000 employees and physician partners care for patients and communities in North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia.”

The hospital is getting ready to get rid of more than 200 workers in a bid to draw down their budget. The job cuts, which are set to impact about 289 workers on the whole, are targeted at the workers of the health care system in the Winston-Salem and Charlotte areas. We do know at the current moment that 103 of the jobs are slated to come from the facility it Charlotte and the rest of the jobs will come from the Winston-Salem area, which means that there is a significant job loss in both locations.

In a memo sent out to all of the workers by Carl Armato, the president of Novant, said the following to the workers, “It’s important to emphasize that Novant Health is financially secure, but we have to meet the challenge of providing more affordable care. We must be proactive, right now, and make tough decisions to ensure we have the resources to continue to deliver the highest possible quality care to the communities we serve, in the months and years ahead.”

No doubt the layoffs of this magnitude will qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term for the purposes of tracking, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” As a matter of fact since two cities metro areas are involved, this may actually qualify as more than one mass layoff action when the official numbers come out.

On the bright side only a minimum of the workers are set to be laid off are from the clinical staff. More than 200 of the workers who are being cut come from the administrative and management staff of the facility.