UCI Medical Center Layoffs to Proceed

UCI Medical Center will lay off 151 workers today despite an employee union’s eleventh-hour plea for a “cooling-off period” to explore other ways to trim costs.

Cliff Fried, vice president of Local 9119 of the University Professional and Technical Employees union, requested Wednesday that the layoffs be rescinded or at least postponed for 60 days.

Administrators “have panicked and not approached this in a rational way to make the institution solvent,” Fried said. “We’re asking them to give a breathing space for people. For us, it’s a humane thing to do.”

But the financially troubled medical center, which is projecting a deficit of nearly $4 million for the current fiscal year, said it would move forward with the layoffs announced in March.

Mark A. Laret, executive director of the medical center, said the union’s suggestion that the hospital ask the University of California Board of Regents for money was not feasible.

“The regents have made it very clear to all the medical center campuses that we are to operate in a financially self-sufficient manner,” Laret said Wednesday. “Financial times are difficult throughout the University of California system, and the regents don’t expect us to contribute to that.”

Laret said the layoffs are a painful but imperative way to streamline operations and reach a goal of saving $13 million in the hospital’s annual operating budget.

The center’s financial woes include the loss of about $20 million this year from a government program that reimburses hospitals for treating a disproportionate number of poor patients. Laret said that if revenue losses continue, the center may be forced to lay off some additional employees.

“It’s very hard in this health care environment to say that there will never be any more layoffs,” Laret said. “But I think if we have layoffs, they will be in very small numbers and in very isolated areas.”

Employees facing their last day of work at UCI Medical Center include Penny Temple, who said she was in “total shock” when word came in March that her job as an administrative analyst would be eliminated.

“I enjoyed working here and I was planning to retire here,” said Temple, 41, a Garden Grove resident who had worked at the center for more than 20 years. “Then they took that away from me.”

John R. Woods, 40, of Costa Mesa was laid off from his position as a nuclear medical technologist, but he will continue to work at the center on a per diem basis. He said the center is being shortsighted in laying off employees, and he predicted that the quality of medical care will suffer.

“It’s going to adversely affect patient care,” said Woods, who has worked at the center for 12 years. “Patients are going to wait much longer for services.”

Laret denied that the quality of service would change.

The laid-off employees are on a preferential rehire list at the medical center, Laret said, and career counseling has been made available. Attempts are also being made, he said, to find jobs for the laid-off workers at the UC Irvine campus.