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Gaylord lays off 6 more support staff
(New Haven Register (New Haven, CT) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jul. 24--WALLINGFORD -- For the second time in three months, Gaylord Hospital has laid off workers.
The Wallingford-based hospital laid off six people in its out-patient division last week, Cindy Whitcomb, a hospital spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Whitcomb described the workers who were laid off as support staff to doctors in the outpatient unit. The layoffs come on the heels of eight jobs being eliminated in late May from the hospital's sleep medicine program. While the end result in both cases is that Gaylord employees lost their jobs, Whitcomb said the latest round of cuts were made for different reasons.
"The jobs that were eliminated in May were part of a reorganization of our sleep medicine department in order to improve efficiency and remain competitive," she said.
"This has to do with an assessment of our outpatient staffing levels in light of two doctors leaving the hospital this spring to pursue other o p p o r t u n i -- ties. We are a nonprofit and financially we have to break even," she said.
David Lane, G a y l o r d ' s administrative director, said the hospital's outpatient operations are broken into two categories: a therapy practice and a physicians business.
The two doctors who left were physiatrists, or rehabilitation physicians, a field of medicine that has proven to be hard for hospitals in New England to find replacements.
"The typical recruitment period is 24 months, which is a sizeable period of t i m e , " L a n e said. "There's a direct correlation between the number of physicians and the staff needed to support them.
W i t h t w o fewer doctors on staff for the t i m e b e i n g , Lane said, hospital officials felt the need to adjust staffing levels accordingly while they evaluate Gaylord's outpatient staffing needs.
"If we have a need to hire more people at some point in the future, we will," Lane said. "This is not indicative of a downturn in this division. The outpatient program has grown in terms of the number of people we serve, the number of people that we see, over the last three years."
Leslie Gianelli, director of communications and public affairs for the Wallingford-based Connecticut Hospital Association, said the action by Gaylord officials is pretty typical of what hospitals all over the state are experiencing.
"Every hospital is looking for efficiencies, but we haven't seen the large-scale layoffs that have affected other sectors of the economy," Gianelli said.
Gaylord employs roughly 800 people.
To see more of New Haven Register, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.nhregister.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, New Haven Register, Conn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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