About 90 employees accept voluntary buyout offer from St. Joseph’s Health

The organization offered it to about 300 eligible employees in an effort to reduce its staff.

Employees with 10 years of service who are at least 55 years of age, and some select job functions were eligible to participate.

“We have reviewed applications from eligible employees who chose to accept the voluntary offer and notified each applicant of their status,” Leslie Luke, president and CEO of St. Joseph’s Health, said in a statement.

“In all, nearly 30 percent of the 300 eligible employees accepted the offer, and we have begun working with them on departure timetables and knowledge transfer. We are pleased to report that the response from eligible and non-eligible employees alike was positive, and we are quite optimistic about our future,” said Luke. 

In his statement, Luke also noted that St. Joseph’s Health is “growing” in some areas of its business and “realigning resources” in others.

“In fact, we employ more people today than we did in 2016, and like any reasonable organization we must continually assess how to best deploy those resources. We have over 150 open positions currently, and we continue to hold recruitment events to help us fill vacancies in strategic focus areas like home care and outpatient services. Ultimately, this effort was a success, and it will help us achieve the flexibility we need in order to continue our transformation from a pay-for-service model to one focused on population health, efficiency and outcomes,” said Luke.

St. Joseph’s, which has an employee count of nearly 4,900, has no plans for layoffs at this time, Luke said in mid-August when St. Joseph’s Health announced the hospital had offered the voluntary-buyout option.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com