When it comes to hospitals it can seem like one is very much like the other, and unless you are going to be getting treatment there that is, there is no reason why you should give one more consideration then the other. So today, before we talk about the layoffs to come, we are going to take a look at how the University of California San Francisco Medical Center has chosen to describe itself, “UCSF Medical Center consistently ranks as one of the top 10 hospitals in the United States. Recognized for innovative treatments, advanced technology, collaboration among health care professionals and scientists, and a highly compassionate patient care team, UCSF Medical Center serves as the academic medical center of the University of California, San Francisco. The medical center’s nationally preeminent programs include children’s health, the brain and nervous system, organ transplantation, women’s health and cancer. It operates as a self-supporting enterprise within UCSF and generates its own revenues to cover the operating costs of providing patient care.”

Sadly the company is getting ready to cut back on about 300 full time jobs in order to cut back on costs and make its balance sheet to right. The company has serious need to cut costs, as they are currently building a large new facility that is set to cost the hospital system $1.5 billion.

Job cuts of this magnitude are 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 only good news is under the terms of a mass layoff action is that the workers must be given several weeks of notice before they are put out of a job.

Interestingly the company’s most recent news was not about the job cuts, “Rates of diagnosed diabetes are much higher among some Asian subgroups than is apparent when aggregating all Asians as a whole, according to a new study by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and UCSF, which appears in the current online issue of Diabetes Care. In this first study to look at Asian subgroup differences in a population with uniform access to health care, there was considerable variation among the seven largest Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups. Pacific Islanders, South Asians and Filipinos had the highest diabetes prevalence (18.3 percent, 15.9 percent, and 16.1 percent respectively) and incidence (19.9, 17.2, 14.7 cases per 1,000-person years, respectively) among all racial/ethnic groups, including minorities traditionally considered high risk, such as African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans.”