California Pacific Medial Center Cuts 120 Jobs

When it comes to medical facilities for many of us any one facility is pretty much like the others. For those of us who do not work in the profession the white corridors and people in blue scrubs all seem to merge into one endless health care entity. So, before we can talk about the layoffs to a specific medical facility we have to put those cuts into some kind of a context.

Take, for example, the case of the California Pacific Medial Center, which is getting ready to make job cuts in the name of the bottom line. The facility describes itself as, “California Pacific Medical Center is one of the largest private, not-for-profit, academic medical centers in California and is a Sutter Health affiliate. As a tertiary referral center, the Medical Center provides a wide variety of services, including acute, post-acute and outpatient hospital care; home care and hospice services; preventive and complementary care and health education.”

The facility is hoping to do that without the help of 120 workers. The company is getting rid of 120 workers who were hired on for a special project the city and the facility were set up to take on as a joint venture. The plans, for a new medical facility in the city, required some sizable investment on the part of the hospital.  For those of you who are not familiar with the project here is a look at last year’s release about the building project, “In an unprecedented commitment, California Pacific Medical Center – part of the Sutter Health network – today offered a Community Benefit Plan worth $1.1 billion to provide health care services to the poor and uninsured, in addition to building two new, earthquake-safe hospitals and creating a Citywide network of care in San Francisco…. The pledge of more than one billion dollars comes on top of CPMC’s $1.9 billion in costs to build a new hospital at Van Ness and Geary, and to rebuild the hospital at its St. Luke’s campus. This brings CPMC’s commitment to $3 billion dollars in new facilities and services in San Francisco, all of which will be borne by the medical center, Sutter Health, and private donations with no cost to taxpayers.”

As there have been issues with the budget, and the fact that the city has put the brakes on the approval process for the time being, the company is cutting back on the myriad of consultants that they have hired on for the project, in order to not waste money while they wait for the approval. The loss of 120 jobs however is still enough to qualify as mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines.

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, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. 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.”

For now the company has said nothing about potential re-hiring’s when the project gets started again.