The original article can be found in: Virgin Islands Daily News
ST. CROIX – In its second round of firings in less than 14 months, Luis Hospital on Wednesday terminated 24 employees in a move that officials said would enable the cash-strapped hospital to avoid the specter of payless paydays in May.
“Today has been one of the most difficult days of my life, having to do this,” Luis Hospital Interim Chief Executive Officer Dr. Kendall Griffith told The Daily News. “But we are facing – if we did not take some sort of action, we would be facing – payless paydays. So we had to take some action.”
The decision to terminate 24 employees was “purely a financial decision,” according to a press release the hospital issued Wednesday.
More than half of those laid off – 13 of the 24 – are graduate nurses who had been with the hospital for more than a year and had not yet passed their licensing exams, according to Griffith.
Graduate nurses, or GNs, have finished nursing school, and local law allows them to work under the supervision of a registered nurse for up to a year while they prepare for and take their licensing exam, Griffith said.
However, the graduate nurses had been in that category for more than a year, he said.
The hospital will pay for the GNs to enroll in a review course for the RN licensing exam at a cost of $800 each, Griffith said. The hospital intends to hire them back once they pass the exam, he said.
The graduate nurses shadowed a registered nurse but could not assume responsibilities for patients on their own, according to Griffith.
“But there comes a point when they have to be an accredited nurse and start taking patients,” he said.
The release said that positions from management to line staff, including administrative, ancillary, support services, clinical and other departments were impacted by the terminations.
“It was really a mix,” Griffith said of the 11 other positions that were eliminated.Aside from graduate nurses, the only other clinical person terminated on Wednesday was a physician, according to Griffith.
During a hospital board meeting Wednesday, he said that the physician’s volume of patient encounters was “pretty low,” and hospital administrators “decided to end that relationship.”
A press release said that the financial problems that created the need to terminate the staff members include:
– A 5 percent reduction in allocations by the Central Government, meaning the hospital will get about $77,000 less per month for the rest of the fiscal year, which is a cut of $533,000 for the year. The reduction was effective in March.
– Continuing negative cash flow for five months this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
– At least $35 million that the hospital owes to its vendors. The press release says that $35 million is owed, but a report given during a board meeting last month indicated that the hospital owes its vendors about $42.9 million. It was not clear Wednesday which of those numbers is more accurate.
Griffith also said that May has three paydays instead of two, although the hospital does not get any additional money from the government for the month.
Wednesday’s firings are expected to save the hospital about $1 million annually, the release said.
Griffith said at the board meeting that hospital executives were directed by the board to come up with a contingency plan to save $5 million.
The plan involved cutting some contracts, which is expected to save about $1 million; terminating the 24 employees, which is expected to result in savings of $1 million; and decreasing the use of locum tenens physicians, which officials hope will save approximately $3 million, Griffith said.
Locum tenens are physicians who are contracted to temporarily fill a gap in the medical staff and are often used in the emergency room.
According to the hospital’s statement, the factors considered when coming up with the positions to eliminate were:
– How critical the positions are to providing safe, quality patient care.
– How necessary the positions are to maintaining efficient operations and obtaining full compliance with regulatory requirements.
– Part-time, temporary and probationary period employees.
– Length of service with Luis Hospital: last in, first out.
Sen. Alicia Hansen, who attended the hospital board meeting Wednesday night, raised a number of issues about the terminations and contended that the last in, first out guideline was not followed.
She also asked point-blank whether this was the last round of firings or whether there would be more to come.
“We don’t know right now,” Griffith said. “Our intent is not to do any more, but we really can’t say.”On Feb. 28, 2012, Luis Hospital fired 86 staff members, most of whom were licensed practical nurses and certified nursing assistants.
Hospital officials said that those dismissals were a move to improve the hospital’s bleak financial position, by saving $4.1 million annually, and were part of a larger initiative to staff the hospital with registered nurses and to obtain Magnet Status.
The hospital has since given its RNs significant raises and has begun an RN hiring drive, in an attempt to vastly reduce the amount the hospitals spends on traveling nurses.
According to the hospital’s statement, the 24 employees who were fired Wednesday will receive a severance package based on their years of service; individual consultation on their personnel file; accrued annual leave payments; assistance with unemployment and job seeking from the Labor Department; and support and counseling services through Employee Health and Clinical Psychology services.
