Visitation Policy: Following the Governor’s decision to allow hospitals to start visitation of patients, Finger Lakes Health will resume hospital visitation at Geneva General Hospital and Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hospital starting next week, pending approval by NYS Department of Health. Details will be available on our website www.flhealth.org. The hours will be in accordance with the prescribed New York State guidelines and therefore will be limited to 4 hours. The hours of 3 P.M. - 7 P.M. have been identified for the two Finger Lakes Health hospitals. Visitors will be limited to one at a time per patient. Our new visitation policy will include other New York State specifications such as visitors being required to be screened and sign-in upon entry and exit, wear a mask, and stay within the room of the patient with whom they are visiting.
Workforce Changes: Nationally and regionally, the healthcare industry continues to face on-going pressures of reimbursement not keeping pace with costs, changes in patterns from inpatient to outpatient care, unfunded regulatory mandates, and external market pressures. There have also been recent reductions to New York State programs and state reimbursement. Finger Lakes Health has not been immune to these circumstances.
COVID-19 resulted in canceled surgeries, preparing for a surge of patients (which thankfully we did not see), shutting down specific revenue generating programs, reduced volumes in acute care, long term care, physician offices, emergency department and urgent care. Simultaneously, we are facing increased costs for mandates such as long term care employee testing and escalating personal protective equipment (PPE) costs. While we had anticipated that we would see some of this volume return, unfortunately, this has not been our experience to date.
As generally the majority, 64%, of our operating costs are labor and workforce, recently this cost has escalated to 75%, which has resulted in Finger Lakes Health furloughing employees and now undertaking a regrettable, yet necessary, reduction in workforce, which will impact approximately 20 employees. The changes will occur with notifications of impacted employees between now and June 24. Positions were reviewed based on changes in service demand and service lines. As a mission-driven, not-for-profit, we focused on core mission activities and stewardship of resources for future sustainability.