The UT Medical Branch in Galveston began to lay off nearly 3,800 campus employees on Tuesday in order to make up for the severe financial losses the university incurred during Hurricane Ike.
The UT System Board of Regents authorized the layoffs at a Nov. 12 meeting. Hurricane Ike caused more than $700 million in losses for the university, mostly from revenue losses from the hospital’s clinical enterprise. UTMB would run out of funds in three months if the layoffs did not take place, said UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine when the layoffs were announced.
While the research and teaching operations at UTMB will continue unabated, “the layoffs will affect individuals in every single area and every single level of the organization,” said Kathy Shingleton, vice president for human resources at the university.
The clinical enterprise on campus will be reduced from a capacity of 550 to 200 beds.
All but 2,800 employees have returned to the campus since it was shut down by the storm.
Most of those employees, Shingleton said, were from the clinical enterprise. Now, the question looming for UTMB employees is whether they will still have a position at the institution and, if not, where they will go next.
“Not just in the area — in the United States of America, my phone rings continually with employers who want to hire our employees,” Shingleton said. “We know for a fact our employees would rather stay and work for UTMB, if they had a choice.”
In some cases, entire units will be cut. Shingleton said the day care center will not be immediately returning.
Shingleton said work opportunities are out there for UTMB employees, but they have to be willing to travel outside Galveston Island to find some of them. She said the Texas Medical Center in Houston and Mainland Medical Center in Houston have already hired UTMB employees. Others may look to transfer to Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas or one of the UT Health Science Centers in Houston, San Antonio or Tyler.
“Our human resources folks have been [telling] the hiring officers here at M.D. Anderson to highly consider these UTMB employees when the positions are available,” said Julie Penne, a spokeswoman for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Shingleton said that about 100 employees have taken jobs elsewhere, but others are waiting to see if they will have a position at UTMB before accepting an offer elsewhere. M.D. Anderson hired 11 full-time employees from UTMB since Oct. 27, Penne said.
Marsha Brody-Silva, manager of employment services at the UT Health Science Center in Houston, said they have hired employees from UTMB, but could not give an exact number.
“I’m not going to say priority in hiring, but they receive recognition that this is a UTMB person, as opposed to just an external applicant,” she said.
Both medical institutions will participate in a job fair for UTMB employees on Dec. 1 and 2 in Galveston.
UT System spokesman Anthony de Bruyn said the regents chose the firm for its experience in helping other academic health centers at New York University, the University of California San Diego and University of California San Francisco make similar turnarounds.
De Bruyn said the consulting firm would not assist UTMB administrators in deciding which positions to cut as it downsizes the workforce.
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