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| Contact: Tom Hayes 612-873-3337 |
01/26/09 |
Hennepin County Medical Center will eliminate almost 100 jobs by the end of February. The medical center is also freezing capital spending that does not have a binding contract to purchase or construct in place. Approximately 80 percent of the jobs to be eliminated are currently vacant, but the remainder of the cuts will be a combination of layoffs and reduced hours.
The cuts are necessary to deal with the governor’s unallotment reduction of $73 million in state Health and Human Services funding announced Dec. 19. Of that, more than 15 percent - $12 million - comes directly from funding to support care and teaching at Hennepin County Medical Center, including a $5 million cut to Medical Assistance supplemental payments for providing care to the poor, and a $7 million reduction in medical education payments to help offset the costs of training residents and medical students. When combined with the $7 million lost due to rate reductions and rebasing delays approved during the 2008 legislative session, the total loss in state funding is $19 million for 2008 and 2009.
“Our patients and the broader community will feel the effects of these cuts, but we made every effort to protect our core services of emergency preparedness, trauma and critical care, access to safety net care, and medical education,” said Lynn Abrahamsen, CEO. “We won’t be able to avoid making significant cuts to one, or all, of these core services if there are additional funding reductions in 2009.
The number of patients seeking care at Hennepin went up nine percent in 2008. Even with this increase in volume, planned expansion of the clinic call center to improve access for patients seeking care will not move forward. Other functions and activities to be scaled back include training for the new electronic health record system, technology improvements, and some maintenance schedules and equipment replacement.
In 2003 – 2004, Hennepin County Medical Center lost $13 million in funding through reductions in rates to pay for care and loss of patient eligibility for state programs. This forced the medical center to cut programs, restrict access to services, layoff employees, and delay capital projects. Since that time, demand for services has continued to increase.
As the state’s largest safety net hospital, Hennepin County Medical Center is a statewide resource fulfilling four critical roles for the people of Minnesota: maintaining 24/7 medical emergency preparedness; teaching tomorrow’s doctors and other health care professionals who will staff clinics and hospitals across the state; supplying top quality Level 1 Trauma, critical burn, and other specialized critical care and services, and offering access to health care for all in need, including those who have only recently discovered - due to a layoff or plant closing - that the safety net is truly here for everyone.
Hennepin County Medical Center is a nationally recognized Level 1 Trauma Center with the largest emergency department in Minnesota. The comprehensive academic medical center and public teaching hospital includes a 446-bed acute care hospital and clinics in downtown Minneapolis and primary care clinics on Lake Street in Minneapolis and in Brooklyn Center and Richfield. For 12 years in a row, Hennepin County Medical Center has been listed in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top U.S. Hospitals in its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” report.
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