Chipping in to help
Posted 3/30/2009
Posted in
BOSTON - Buoyed by an outpouring of goodwill and shared sacrifice from staff and physicians, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will be able to significantly trim costs and reduce the number of employees who will lose their job in the current economic downturn.
The economic game plan developed by President and CEO Paul Levy after a series of 11 "town hall meetings" with staff, shrinks potential layoffs from 600 to less than 140. The plan includes a temporary freeze in wages, matching 401(k) contributions and adjustments in vacation accrual. The plan exempts the medical center's lowest-paid workers - housekeepers, transporters, food service workers materials handlers, drivers/couriers, mailroom assistants, patient observers, and unit assistants from the wage freeze.
Employees have launched an effort to support their colleagues, helping staff to quickly and easily make a gift in support of the hospital. In its first hours online, the fund received nearly a dozen gifts, including a $500 gift from a nurse.
The medical center's staff effort was joined by 13 chiefs of the clinical departments, who collectively accepted pay cuts of $350,000 to create a Physicians Support BIDMC Fund. The chiefs who do not technically work for the medical center, but instead are employed Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at BIDMC - encouraged their physician colleagues throughout the medical center to join the effort.
To read more, please click here. And to learn more about how BIDMC has been joined by other Boston businesses, check out this Globe story.
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