St. Anthony’s Medical Center  is a name that many of you are not likely to be familiar with unless you have had to stay there. After all unless you have been to stay at a hospital they are all kind of the same. So before we talk about the job cuts coming to the facility we are going to have to take a look at how the facility has chosen to describe itself, “The leaders, physicians and staff of St. Anthony’s Medical Center have carried out Christ’s healing ministry with the delivery of health care services to area residents for more than 130 years… St. Anthony’s Medical Center serves more than 918,000 residents in St. Louis County, southern communities and several counties in southwest Illinois.”

Sadly the facility is cutting back on 176 workers in a bid to reduce its costs. The company did not break down the layoffs by department, but they did say that 25 of the job cuts are impacting members of the management team, which means that the rest of the cuts will be coming to regular members of the staff.

Job cuts of this magnitude are more than enough to trigger 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.”

Interestingly enough in their most recent press release the company chose not to talk about its worsening fiscal condition or the job cuts that they were making, instead the chose to highlight the activities of their charitable foundation, “An area physician who founded an organization that provides medical care to the underserved and a retired nurse who volunteers her time caring for cancer patients are the recipients of this year’s Spirit of St. Anthony Awards. The Physician Ambassadors of St. Anthony’s Charitable Foundation honored David Campbell, M.D., and Clarette Harnish, R.N., with the awards at their recent annual fundraising dinner at the Top of the Met. This year’s dinner raised $107,000. Campbell, who received the Spirit of St. Anthony Award for medical care, is the founder, president and CEO of the Institute for Family Medicine, an organization of medical professionals who have, in lieu of other practice opportunities, chosen to dedicate their careers to providing medical care to the poor, disadvantaged and medically underserved. The focus of the organization is to improve access to quality medical care by reducing barriers to health care.”

For now the facility has not said how the job cuts are going to impact the quality of care given to patients at the facility.