Photo by Thomas Breen
YNHH VP Vin Petrini: Big deficits led to big layoffs.
Yale New Haven Health fired 72 hospital managers Wednesday and eliminated another 83 vacant administrative positions systemwide “Restructuring” undertaken in the face of rising costs and an expected $300 million deficit.
YNHH Vice President Vin Petrini confirmed these layoffs in a telephone interview with the Independent.
He said the regional health system cut a total of 155 jobs from its roughly 30,000 employees on Wednesday.
Since more than half of these positions were vacant, 72 employees were actually made redundant. The group includes 51 employees who worked in New Haven.
YNHH owns and operates a total of seven hospital campuses including in Greenwich, Bridgeport, New London, Westerly, RI, and in New Haven at York Street and St. Raphael’s.
Petrini stressed that all of the posts that were cut were management and administrative roles. None of the discharged individuals worked in patient care, catering, security or transportation. Those layoffs “had no impact on frontline workers and caregivers,” he said. And the layoffs affected both junior and senior managers.
That was “rather a restructuring of our management team to be more nimble in the face of serious economic pressures YNHHjust like other healthcare systems across the country, are currently facing.
Wednesday is on “incredibly difficult day,” said Petrini. He said many of the employees the hospital system has laid off have been invited to apply for other positions YNHH.
He also said that so many jobs are being cut and so many employees are being laid off at once “is not something this system has had to do before. He said each person who has been made redundant has been told in one-on-one meetings with managers and their final days at work will be later this week.
YNHH Hospital campus on York Street.
“Given the financial challenges we are facing, we will end the year with a loss of $300 million,” Petrini said. He said YNHH’s budget for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, will likely include an expected $250 million deficit.
The driving of those deficits, he said, had been all since the federal government expired CARES to trade grants “historical inflation” to difficulties in the supply chain “Premium labor costs for the unprecedented number of traveling nurses the hospital system has employed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Still, even with these management-level layoffs, Petrini said YNHH will “continue to invest in key positions” such as nurses. “We’d rather invest in our people,” rather than hiring travel nurses to fill gaps at higher costs, he said.
How exactly does the hospital intend to address these deficiencies?
“We know it will take a few years to get the healthcare system back to a healthy financial state, he said. Some of the strategies the hospital will pursue include “Reducing premium work” – meaning hiring less expensive travel nurses. He said YNHH is too “aggressively working on supply chain costs” and “Working on length of stay issues.” He said the hospital will continue to invest in building the new neuroscience research and treatment center on the St. Raphael campus, which he says has benefited from many philanthropic donations.
