Months after furloughing hundreds of its employees, Marshfield Clinic Health System has informed many of those workers that they will be terminated “in early May,” a spokesperson of the 11-hospital organization confirmed.
In January, the Wisconsin-based system said it would be furloughing 3% of its roughly 12,000 employees in a bid to manage its labor costs. The decision came after word that its merger with fellow Midwest nonprofit Essentia Health would not come to pass.
In an emailed statement, the system told Fierce Healthcare that it informed the to-be-laid-off employees this week. The system is offering a severance package and will be “ensuring they have access to any available resources and assistance, including encouraging them to review other opportunities within the Health System in areas with specific needs.”
Among the employees that were furloughed, Marshfield said more than 60 have been offered other positions within the health system.
“Dozens more opted to take roles outside the organization,” the system wrote.
The nonprofit, which often describes itself as one of the largest rural integrated systems in the country, operates throughout Wisconsin and in parts of Michigan. Its operations include a health plan, research and education programs and more than 65 clinical locations.
Marshfield Clinic’s salaries, contract labor and benefits expenses were down nearly 4% across the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2023, as compared to the same period a year prior, according to quarterly financial filings.
However, the roughly $3 billion organization’s operations have lost $133.5 million (-5.8% operating margin) during the first three frames of 2023 and follow full-year operating losses of $367.9 million in 2022 and $60.2 million in 2021.
Marshfield’s terminated merger would have married its business to a system with operations and a bottom line both in the black. The deal would have created a 25-hospital system. Marshfield and Essentia said in January that the decision to stay apart was mutual.
Marshfield’s credit rating was recently downgraded by Fitch Ratings from “BBB+” to “BBB” and twice by S&P Global from “A-“ to “BBB+” and then to “BBB.”
The latter agency said its decision reflected “ongoing performance challenges that reflect difficulties in labor and other sector pressures” along with other factors that increased the system’s debt.
“While we believe the interim management team (along with consultants) is making strides in performance improvement initiatives and optimizing various IT systems, the organization is still in transition as it actively searches for a partner following the end of the definitive agreement with Essentia Health in January 2024, and as it looks to stabilize the organization after the build-out of the inpatient hospital expansions of the last several years,” S&P wrote in a March 25 notice.