The University of Chicago Medical Center says it is eliminating the jobs of 450 employees, as part of a continuing reorganization of its hospitals and health research operations.

The employees are being informed today their jobs are being eliminated.

Over the next 18 months, officials “will continue to eliminate positions through attrition, by not filling positions that become vacant.”

The laid-off workers are to get severance pay of two weeks for every year they worked at U of C, to a maximum of 26 weeks; plus another one month of pay for the lack of advance notice.

The cuts come as the medical center has been reorganizing its patient care, biomedical research and education and community health under the banner Chicago BioMedicine.