Map of Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center
Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center announced this week that it will eliminate 144 positions as a result of the sour economy.
The recession has caused the hospital to take a double hit, spokesman Dan Davidson said. Fewer people are becoming patients, and fewer people are paying their bills.
Patient volume across the Las Vegas valley fell 2.6 percent from 2010 to 2011, Davidson said.
Las Vegas residents aren’t becoming healthier. Rather, they are forgoing hospital visits because they worry about covering copays and deductibles and taking time off from work, Davidson said.
About a third of valley residents are uninsured, Davidson said. As a result, Sunrise has seen a 26 percent increase in uncompensated care over the past year.
“Some of it is people without insurance; some of it is unpaid bills,” Davidson said. “It puts quite a burden on the facility.”
Sunrise announced the cuts to employees Tuesday. To minimize layoffs, administrators plan to trim open positions and reduce contract staff.
Hospital executives also offered workers voluntary severance packages. Even so, buyouts will likely not prevent pink slips, Davidson said.
Workers must decide by May 30 whether they will take severance.
“At the end of that process, we’ll have a much better sense of how many people will be displaced from the organization,” Davidson said.
Cuts will affect Sunrise Hospital and Sunrise Children’s Hospital.
Sunrise officials stressed that patient care will not be compromised, despite a smaller staff.
“One of our main goals was to limit impact at the bedside,” Davidson said. “If you are a patient, you should have no concern about the quality of care. We have gone through a very thorough process so we can make sure we our meeting our patients’ needs.”