Mass General Brigham said layoffs wouldn't affect patient care. Some disagree.
They include six full-time chaplains — at least half of whom worked directly with patients and families facing health crises and end-of-life decisions. Also laid off: the director of domestic violence programs at Brigham and Women's Hospital who counseled patients who had survived human trafficking and other abuse; and an employee in Massachusetts General Hospital's Living Tobacco-Free program who helped hundreds of patients quit smoking each year.
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Tara Deonauth, a board-certified chaplain and graduate of Harvard Divinity School who served as spiritual care manager at Faulkner Hospital, said she was 'shocked and heartbroken' when she was laid off on March 10.
'I could not have worked more closely with patients,' said Deonauth, who estimated she saw about 25 patients a week and spent up to an hour with each, listening to stories of grief and hopelessness. Most were in intensive care or a secure psychiatric unit for patients
at risk for harming themselves or others.
Deonauth said she was 'on call 24-7″
and responded to requests in the middle of the night,
including arranging for a Catholic priest to deliver last rites.
A number of employees who were laid off signed confidentiality agreements and declined to comment out of fear of jeopardizing severance packages. However, the Boston Globe confirmed the layoffs from co-workers who kept their jobs.
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Jessica Pastore, a spokesperson for MGB, said the job cuts focused on nonclinical managers and administrators and that Klibanski never said all employees who worked with patients would be excluded from layoffs. Individual hospitals, she said, made decisions 'to ensure there would be no negative impacts to patient care.'
Six weeks ago, MGB announced it would
make
Mass General Brigham announced the most layoffs in its history in February.
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Klibanski said in her email the system would streamline its administration by making cuts 'focused on non-clinical and non-patient facing roles' and complete
The Globe
MGB declined to specify how many people have been laid off.
Among those who have been especially hard hit were MGB's chaplains. The system laid off two of its nine chaplains at MGH and the hospital's head of spiritual care, the Rev. Donna Blagdan, who oversaw them and is a board-certified chaplain. She declined to comment, but multiple remaining MGB chaplains confirmed her departure.
By the end of August, the system also plans to end the Clinical Pastoral Education program at MGH, which for about 90 years trained people to work as chaplains at hospitals, prisons, fire departments, and other settings inside and outside of Massachusetts. The program is said to be the first at a general hospital in the country.
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MGB is
laying off Rabbi Shulamit Izen, director of the program, in August when the last five students complete their training. The program will then close, according to multiple current hospital employees and graduates of the program. Izen declined to comment.
During the yearlong program, trainees work 27 hours a week as chaplains 'in residency' at MGH, counseling sick or dying patients, helping families navigate the decision to take loved ones off life support, and comforting employees struggling with traumatic situations at the hospital.
Jonathan DeWeese, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and psychotherapist in Cambridge who completed the program a decade ago, said he worked overnight shifts, supporting patients and families as they grappled with terminal illnesses and agonizing loss.
'Doctors don't have the time or the skill to sit with the distressed family that just lost their teenager or 20-year-old son in a car accident,' said DeWeese, who serves as an adviser to the program. 'That's one of the many scenarios in which a chaplain is really needed.'
Meanwhile, Brigham laid off one of its two educators of chaplains at that hospital's residency program who also worked directly with patients, according to the Rev. Jennie Gould, the remaining educator and a chaplain.
Ruth Delfiner, a part-time chaplain at MGH, said the job cuts by MGB 'shows their absolute lack of sympathy for what it is that we do.'
'These are programs which they put in place for appearances, but when they're concerned about the bottom line, they're going to be the first to go,' she said.
Pastore, the MGB spokesperson, said 'patients and families will continue to have access to chaplains from a variety of religious backgrounds and especially in instances of emergent care, which is available every day of the week, at all times.' She also said the system is merging MGH's and Brigham's chaplain residency programs.
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With the layoffs, Gould said she doubted Brigham will be able to have a chaplain on site at all times, as it had before, or be able to respond to every cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest, and request by relatives of deceased patients to view bodies in a room near the morgue.
A photo shows Tara Deonauth, a chaplain who was recently laid off, with Faulkner ICU Clinical Leader Ellen McCarthy, left, who nominated her for an I Care Award when Tara worked in the hospital.
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Multiple employees said Loftus provided direct therapy services to nearly a dozen victims of human trafficking.
Loftus also provided
training on how to care for survivors of trauma and violence to more than 900 front-line clinicians last year alone.
About 100 health care providers were so alarmed by Loftus's dismissal that they signed a petition urging leadership to rehire her.
'While her official title is Clinical Program Director, Jessica provides direct patient care to hundreds of patients throughout our system,' said the letter.
Loftus said patient care 'inevitably suffers' when clinicians are 'seen as job titles rather than humans.'
Pastore, the MGB spokesperson, said
Loftus had a 'management role that was consolidated from two managers managing a group of social workers down to one manager. This was a reduction of a management layer, not the elimination of a clinical care role.'
In response, Loftus said, 'They can classify it however they want, but my role in our human trafficking program was direct patient care.'
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MGB has also laid off both employees of the Mass General Living Tobacco-Free program, which the health system decided last year to end in 2025, Pastore confirmed.
One of the employees was a tobacco treatment specialist who helped several hundred smokers a year try to quit, according to a staffer at a community health center and another person familiar with the program. Both sources insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. The other laid-off employee was the program manager.
The program operated at community health centers in Charlestown, Chelsea, Revere, and Everett, and featured one-on-one coaching, support groups, yoga, and other tools.
Pastore said there are still multiple tobacco treatment programs in Boston run by other groups.
Dr. Mark Eisenberg, who worked for 37 years as a primary care physician at MGH Charlestown and now works part time helping patients with addictions at the hospital, said he often referred patients to Tobacco-Free.
'It was a great resource for a physician who didn't have the time during a 15-minute appointment to effectively counsel patients,' he said.
Dr. Michael Barnett, a primary care physician at Brigham and associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he was dismayed by the layoffs of staffers who worked with patients, but he wasn't particularly surprised.
'As primary care doctors, we know that MGB doesn't invest in interventions that improve public health unless they generate huge profits,' said Barnett,
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In March,
Pastore did not respond to Barnett's criticism.
Gould, the Brigham chaplain, said layoffs of employees who dealt directly with patients was short-sighted and often affected workers with relatively modest salaries.
'Look,' she said, 'chaplains are not breaking the MGB bank.'
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at
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Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Mass. considers scrapping religious exemptions for vaccinations
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Newsweek
2 days ago
- Newsweek
Is Health Care a Right? Trinity Health CEO weighs in
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When our parents need emergency surgery, many of us would be grateful to not have to scramble for a credit card first. Indeed, the majority of Americans want Medicaid funding to either remain about the same or increase. That's true of Democrats, Republicans, independents, Trump voters and Harris voters, according to a recent survey from KFF. But Americans are also frustrated by high health care costs and a perceived lack of price transparency. Many felt their trust in medical institutions fracture during the COVID-19 pandemic. For some, those cracks have only widened with time and increasingly political messaging. (Check this week's report from the conservative consumer advocacy organization Consumers' Research, which accused Cleveland Clinic, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and three other academic health systems of misappropriating government resources to prop up a "woke" agenda.) 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Trinity Health How do you foresee Medicaid cuts impacting Trinity Health's financial stability and long-term strategy? You can't cut billions from Medicaid and not affect people in the health of communities. Up to 10 million people losing coverage as a result of this is going to be devastating for our communities. We know when people don't have access to care, they forego preventive care and they end up in the emergency departments, which are already overflowing. It results in more costly care and interventions. Our calculations just on the House version—not all the stuff the Senate is now considering, which are even maybe more onerous for us—we estimate an [annual] impact of $600 million to our budget once implementation happens over the next couple of years. As a faith-based, not-for-profit health system, we don't set goals to earn big margins or profits. In fact, this year, we've been running at three-tenths-of-a-percent operating margin. 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But we have financial counselors that sit with people every day to try to help them qualify for Medicaid or other coverage. We know that there is not that level of waste, fraud and abuse in the program. There are very rigorous regulations and rules about who can be covered and how they can be covered, and we just don't see that this is an elimination of simple "waste, fraud and abuse" of the system. C-Suite Shuffles Amazon Health Services is reorganizing, simplifying the business into six units called "pillars," CNBC reported. The move comes after a recent string of leadership departures, including former Amazon Vice President of Healthcare Aaron Martin and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sunita Mishra, and former Chief Medical Officer of Amazon Pharmacy Dr. Vin Gupta. 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American Military News
2 days ago
- American Military News
Remains of nearly 800 babies, kids may be recovered, identified during excavation in Ireland
An excavation at the site of a former Catholic home for babies and unmarried women was launched on Monday by officials in Ireland to identify the remains of roughly 800 babies and young children who died at the home. According to The Associated Press, the excavation was launched by Irish authorities this week at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, which is located in the western part of Ireland. The outlet noted that the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, which was run by Catholic nuns until it was shut down in 1961, was one of many similar institutions that provided homes for unmarried pregnant women and orphans throughout the 20th century in Ireland. The Associated Press reported that historian Catherine Coreless investigated almost 800 death certificates in 2014 for almost 800 babies and young children who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home from the 1920s to 1961. However, despite tracking down hundreds of death certificates, Coreless was only able to find one child's burial record, according to the outlet. After the historian's investigation, investigators discovered a mass grave located in an underground sewage structure on the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home property that contained the remains of young children and babies, according to The Associated Press. The outlet noted that a DNA analysis determined that the remains were from children as young as 35 weeks of gestation to children as old as 3 years. READ MORE: Pics: Suspect arrested for digging up grave site 'It's a very, very difficult, harrowing story and situation,' Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said in a Monday statement obtained by The Associated Press. 'We have to wait to see what unfolds now as a result of the excavation.' According to The Associated Press, Daniel MacSweeney, who is leading the excavation effort at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home property, explained that survivors and family members will be able to view the progress at the mass grave site in a matter of weeks. However, the outlet reported that the excavation project could take a total of two years. MacSweeney said, 'This is a unique and incredibly complex excavation.' The Associated Press reported that the remains recovered from the excavation site will be preserved and analyzed by forensic experts and that identified remains will be returned to the family members of the deceased babies and young children.
