The SUNY medical system is one that you may not be familiar with in general. For those of you who are not too familiar with the facility here is a look at how the organization has chosen to describe itself, “The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, educating nearly 468,000 students in more than 7,500 degree and certificate programs on 64 campuses with nearly 3 million alumni around the globe.”

Sadly the facility is getting ready to get rid of 1,000 or so workers in order to put its budget to a more stable place. This will be enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

The cuts are, for now, not going into action totally. While some workers have already been given their walking papers the rest of the workers are not being notified as of yet. The company may adjust the number of job cuts up or down, depending on how much funding they get from the city and the state for the coming fiscal year.

Interestingly enough the company did just receive a significant grant, but that money cannot be used to keep workers in their jobs. Instead it must be used on research about how to keep minority and immigrant patients healthy, though one has to wonder how much the results of research like this will be worth if there are significant reductions to the people who actually give care. Here is an excerpt from that release, “The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced a $5.5 million grant over five years to advance the work of the Brooklyn Health Disparities Center (BHDC), a joint venture of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office. The goal of BHDC is to reduce health disparities among minorities and new immigrants in Brooklyn. The grant, under the leadership of principal investigators Moro O. Salifu, MD, professor of medicine and chief of nephrology at SUNY Downstate, and Ruth C. Browne, ScD, chief executive officer of the Arthur Ashe Institute, will support community engagement to drive research, training, and policy.”

This is not the first time that the hospital system has resorted to cuts in the recent past. For those of you who missed out on cuts to Long Island College Hospital, another hospital in the SUNY family, here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all, “Apparently all of that history is not enough to allow the 150 workers that they are getting ready to get rid of in order to set their budget to right. The workers are getting ready to be put of the payrolls in a mass layoff action.”