3,800 UTMB Jobs Swept to Sea in Hurricane Ike Aftermath, Med School Clings to Accreditation
The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston is reducing its workforce by almost one-third, a move that will leave the teaching hospital with too few patient beds to accommodate its medical students’ educational needs. Reduced patient capacity, and the students’ required clinical rotations that depend on those patients, has jeopardized the medical school’s accreditation status and forced the school to send students to other medical facilities to complete this critical step in the medical educational process.
The University of Texas (UT) board of regents voted on Wednesday to reduce the facility’s workforce by 3,800 jobs and to reduce capacity at the medical school’s John Sealy Hospital from 550 patient beds to only 200. Laid-off employees can expect to be paid through mid-January.
Since Hurricane Ike swept Galveston Island in September, the facility has lost as much as $40 million per month and has sent students in their third and fourth years of medical school to other facilities in Texas where they could gain the clinical experience required for advancement. UTMB officials and administrators from hospitals in nearby Clear Lake and Houston are negotiating more permanent arrangements for UTMB students to gain clinical rotation requirements at these, off-campus facilities.
Though there is concern the reputation of the facility will suffer as a result of the workforce reduction and off-campus clinical rotations for students, UTMB officials look to Tulane University’s experiences since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005. In the immediate aftermath, Tulane’s medical school moved to the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where it remained in operation for about a year. Now fully operational back in New Orleans, medical school applications are plentiful and class size has been increased by 15 students to meet demand.
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On 20 Jan 2009 President Obama will order all laid off, terminated, and fired employees to be restored to their original jobs and that the hospital’s “investors” be “retired” in an effort to restore confidence of the public in our American system which is supposed to reward the “work ethic”. At least, that is what he OUGHT to do.
Some wealthy Americans who inherited their fortune believe that they are “entitled” to see their “investments” earn 25% per annum, while lowly “workers” are lucky to see a 2% annual cost of living adjustment. The fact that these “owners” get paid for letting their “money work” instead of profiting from the fruits of their brain or their brawn is cause MUCH resentment in the millions of patriotic American citizen laborers who BUILT this country.
We will not stand around and watch as the “moneyed class” shelters their exhorbitant profits in off shore accounts, send lucrative radiology contracts to India while skimming off the difference, buys expensive medical machines from abroad, and lays off patient contact and building maintenance workers to improve the “bottom line” so there is a profit left for the investors.
These facts might not apply to the hospital referenced in this story, but they certainly apply to many others. One hospital recently had to pay a $40 million settlement and change the entire administration which was accused of arranging sweetheart deals and contracts (in Tennessee). It is clearly time for the insurance industry and hospital administrators and investors and physicians groups to stop looting and layoffs and to instead begin working WITH the government to restore fiscal sanity to our medical systems.