Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center eliminating 950 positions

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center announced this morning that it will eliminate 950 positions by June 30 of next year.

About half the reductions will be achieved by eliminating vacant positions, attrition, retirements as well as by eliminating temporary and contract worker jobs.

About 475 of the 950 positions are currently filled with full-time employees. Those employees account for about 3.5 percent of Wake Forest Baptist's total workforce.

The Winston-Salem medical center laid off 76 workers this week.

The layoffs are part of an ongoing restructuring of the medical center's operations that is in response to the changing health care landscape, the center said in a statement. About two-thirds of Wake Forest Baptist's total costs are labor.

The center said that it is changing its cost structure to better match the challenges posed by health care reform, federal budget deficits and a decline in federal research funding.

The center said that, even with expansion of health care coverage that will come with health care reform, it and other hospital systems are bracing for a 10 percent reduction in reimbursements to health care providers over the next two to three years.

"Many industries have simultaneously lowered costs while increasing quality, but it is not possible to lower costs without increasing labor productivity," the center's statement said. "The Medical Center has measured its resources and productivity against other high quality, academic medical centers to help determine the best cost structure. The goal of the Medical Center is to be in the top quartile of academic medical centers in labor productivity by June 30, 2013, the end of the fiscal year."

About one-third of the positions being eliminated are in corporate services and administrative areas.

"This change will not affect nurse-to-patient ratios, the quality of patient care or the pioneering research that is occurring at Wake Forest Baptist each day," the center said.