Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital and Long Beach Memorial, the city’s largest and busiest hospital, have laid off 72 people in the last month and eliminated more than a dozen vacant positions.
The latest round of layoffs arrived in mid-January when the hospitals let go 59 employees, a move that comes on the heels of Memorial announcing the closure of its outpatient pharmacy and the termination of its 13 workers.
In an internal memo that a former employee provided to the Business Journal, hospital CEO Blair Kent, who joined the Memorial one year ago following the abrupt resignation of John Bishop , announced what he called a “restructure” of operations, saying the leadership regularly “assesses operational strategies” to improve performance.
“The new structure supports best practices within health care and aligns with today’s hospitals and the needs of the care teams and the patients we serve,” Kent wrote in the memo dated Jan. 23. “The changes are focused on optimizing operations and further prioritizing patient-centered care.”