Children’s Hospital & Research Center of Oakland

In a move that stunned the medical staff at Children's Hospital Oakland, hospital officials abruptly laid off 84 people recently, including doctors, nurses and clinical workers who were escorted out of the facility by security. The cuts, affecting 3 percent of the hospital's workforce, are intended to save $10 million a year, said the president and chief executive of Children's Hospital and Research Center at Oakland, in a recent letter sent to hospital employees. Numerous departments were affected, audiology, craniofacial, nephrology and dentistry. According to sources, some departments are being almost entirely eliminated. The layoffs took place on the day that the state began imposing a 10 percent cut in Medi-Cal reimbursement rates. Some 774,000 people in the Bay Area receive Medi-Cal. According to Tiedemann, approximately 67 percent of the hospital's patients are covered by the safety net program for the state's poor.