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Hospitals Chief Expects to Cut 3,900 Jobs

New York City’s public hospitals will be forced to cut 3,900 jobs over two years — a tenth of the work force — if state budget cuts go through, the system’s president said Thursday.

Alan Aviles, president of the 11-hospital Health and Hospitals Corporation, said he expected to have to reduce the work force by 2,600 employees over the next fiscal year, in addition to cutting 1,300 through the fiscal year ending June 30.

The projected cuts, which would leave the system with about 35,000 employees, would be the biggest since the early days of the Giuliani administration in the mid-1990s, Mr. Aviles said.

Mr. Aviles said the reductions so far had been accomplished through attrition, but it was probably inevitable that some of the further cuts would require layoffs in categories including essential medical personnel, like doctors and nurses. But he said it was not clear what the mix of attrition and layoffs would be.

“There certainly would be substantial layoffs among that downsizing of 2,600,” Mr. Aviles said in an interview. The job reductions would entail closing or reducing some services and programs across the system, he said, declining to reveal details.

“We have an idea, but we don’t yet have decisions,” he said. “I am not going to make people crazy in terms of our own work force by suggesting what might be done when we don’t know for certain.”

Mr. Aviles said the possible layoffs, which were reported on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site on Thursday night, stemmed from a projected hospital system budget deficit of $700 million to $1 billion. The deficit is caused by cuts in Medicaid and a proposed shift of about $300 million in federal financing for poor patients from public to private hospitals, even as the number of poor and uninsured patients in city hospitals is rising.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Hospitals Chief Expects to Cut 3,900 Jobs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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