LA JOLLA, Calif. (KGTV) \u2014 Dozens of people protested outside UC San Diego Health in La Jolla after hundreds of employees lost their jobs in a sudden round of layoffs.<\/p>\n
Former employees and current staff members gathered with signs and chants, expressing concerns that the staffing cuts will negatively impact patient care at the hospital.<\/p>\n
“Any plan that I had is out the window as of right now. Pretty much everything is on hold,” said Randall Turner, a former business tech support analyst who was laid off.<\/p>\n
Turner said hospital management informed him around 11 a.m. Monday that he was being laid off before escorting him off the property.<\/p>\n
“I still have family I want to visit. I would like to have the money in case that time does come or for me to support everybody that is in my life,” Turner said.<\/p>\n
Turner was one of 230 people who lost their jobs at the hospital.<\/p>\n
“Every single one of us needs to band together to make sure that UC knows that everything that they’re doing affects our patients and it affects our staff,” Turner said.<\/p>\n
Jon Sunada, a physical therapist and union representative for University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE), said the hospital has already been dealing with a staffing crisis that impacts patient wait times and limits appointments.<\/p>\n
“We have clinical lab scientists who, even before the layoffs, were saying that they were concerned that because staffing was so limited, the possibility of errors would be high,” Sunada said.<\/p>\n
UC San Diego Health said in a statement that the layoffs were in response to financial pressure caused by federal impacts to health care. A spokesperson partially blamed insurance companies, citing the “rising costs of providing care combined with reimbursement rates from Medicare, Medicaid.”<\/p>\n
Sunada questioned that response and emphasized his concerns about patient care.<\/p>\n
“Now, since the layoffs, we’re even more concerned that this is going to impact patient care negatively,” Sunada said.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LA JOLLA, Calif. (KGTV) \u2014 Dozens of people protested outside UC San Diego Health in La Jolla after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[13828,5229,1582,276,13829,13830,13831,1809,3549,7264,13832,13833,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-13065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-13828","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-dozens","13":"tag-lays-off","14":"tag-more","15":"tag-protest","16":"tag-san-diego","17":"tag-sandiego","18":"tag-than","19":"tag-uc-san-diego-health","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114743138267570038","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}