Berkshire County — CHP (Community Health Programs) Berkshires has laid off eight employees and instituted a series of cost-cutting measures due to a $4 million shortfall in its budget.
The organization, which is based out of Great Barrington, offers numerous health services and programs, including services offered through a sliding-fee discount program; mobile health clinics; and services offered in the Great Barrington Community Health Center, Lee Family Practice, Pittsfield Neighborhood Health Center, North Adams Family Medical and Dental, and other various pediatric and dental services in locations throughout Berkshire County.
Details of the cost-cutting measures were revealed in an undated memo written by CHP CEO Bethany Kieley that was sent to employees and subsequently leaked via an anonymous post on a Great Barrington Facebook page.
Kieley confirmed to the Berkshire Edge that she wrote the memo to employees. “As we’ve discussed at our town hall meetings this year, CHP has been dealing with a serious financial deficit almost since the start of our fiscal year last July,” Kieley wrote in her memo. “This is largely because the one-time funding we received during the pandemic has expired. Those funds enabled us to invest in our people and mission during the COVID-19 crisis. We must now reckon with the expiration of these funds, along with other financial deficits. Despite the hard work of so many CHP staff, we have an immediate multi-million-dollar cash shortfall that we have to address urgently.”
Kieley explained to The Berkshire Edge that the organization received extra federal funds during the pandemic. “With the funding that came in, we made some decisions about how to invest those funds,” Kieley said. “Some of [that investment] was related to staff costs and to increase staff, including staff pay and some bonuses because obviously there were demands that were put on all healthcare workers, including ours. We also increased our mobile health units.”
Kieley said that the organization’s mobile-health-unit program was “small scale” before the pandemic. “We really scaled [mobile health] up and invested heavily in that,” Kieley said. “We also invested in other things as well, including our dental programs. With that funding, we made a lot of investments with the expectation that the revenue would come in and that we would—by the time the pandemic funding ended—we’d be in a position to have those investments sort of begin to pay off from a revenue perspective.”
Kieley emphasized that the organization is not yet in a financially healthy situation. “Because of the changes in the environment [of health care] and its continuing increasing costs, we simply haven’t gotten there yet,” Kieley said. “We will, and I’m absolutely confident we will. It’s just really been a year of transition where certain revenue didn’t increase as quickly as we thought; some expenses were more than we thought. We’ve continued to try to make investments to be sure that we’re meeting the needs of the community that we’re serving.”
Kieley said that seven of the positions that were laid off were administrative positions, and one position was from the organization’s mobile health unit. “We have two mobile health units, and we have been keeping one unit on the road full time,” Kieley said. “We laid off one position from one of the units because that unit was overstaffed. Other than that, the layoffs were all in the back office.”
Kieley said that, with the layoffs, the organization currently employs 280 people.
When asked if there would be a reduction in services offered to residents by the organization, Kieley said that all services would remain the same. “We didn’t make any reductions on our health-provider staff, or where it comes to nursing and medical assistants,” Kieley said. “We also didn’t make any reductions to our family-services programs, where we provide a lot of our programs to support families.”
Kieley said that she did not anticipate any further layoffs or reductions in the near future. “I don’t anticipate that there will be, but we have to see how the coming months go,” Kieley said. “It is certainly not our plan to make other reductions. The organization is not in danger. We’ve always been a very stable organization that’s very well run. We will continue to look to the future, and we do that with complete confidence that the organization is solid and will continue to thrive and grow, and, eventually, we will continue to add services where it’s needed in the county.”
CHP was founded in 1975 and currently serves over 30,000 patients in Berkshire County.
Kieley’s memo sent out to employees, and subsequently shared with The Berkshire Edge by Kieley, details further reductions to staff benefits:
