Laid off from Banner Health.

What Banner Health layoffs have meant for employees

Loveland's cut followed a decision about what the hospital would be. Alan Qualls, Banner's Northern Colorado chief, said McKee's emergency volumes had fallen four years running and that the hospital was using 25% of its beds, in an announcement BizWest quoted. McKee was to become a specialty campus anchored by Banner's MD Anderson cancer center, keeping inpatient and outpatient medical and surgical care, rehabilitation, a cardiac catheterization lab and interventional radiology. Banner's WARN letter said many of the affected employees could work at that transformed Loveland campus or at other Banner locations in northern Colorado. It said none of those employees had bumping rights or union representation. Emergency care, Banner said, would continue at its hospitals in Greeley, Fort Collins, Brush and Sterling.

Banner has leaned on internal placement before. When it cut a small number of Tucson jobs in 2015, a few months after taking over University Medical Center, Banner told AZPM that 90 percent of the people its transition program aided after a 2014 merger with Casa Grande Regional Medical Center had found other Banner jobs, a figure that comes from Banner itself. In April 2020, as it planned furloughs, Banner said it had already moved 1,500 employees out of elective procedures and into its COVID-19 response. For Loveland, the spokesperson who spoke to BizWest described recruiters working with each person, training for roles outside their skillset, first choice for open positions across Banner, career counseling, and mental health and financial planning resources. If you were on the Loveland list and your role had no match elsewhere in Banner, you could use that training offer to go after openings outside your old skillset.

Loveland's cut came as a rival system was expanding. By mid-November 2025, Kevin Unger, who runs UCHealth's Northern Colorado hospitals, told BizWest that UCHealth was getting applicants from Banner and hiring a number of Banner employees for its three hospitals in the region, as UCHealth's expansions called for more staff. The Loveland exhibit was heavy with clinical titles, 82 RNs among them, listed beside nurse practitioners, physicians and certified patient care assistants. If you were a nurse on that list, a second hospital system in the region was taking Banner applicants that fall.

Banner's chief executive has put a number on the pressure ahead. In her November 2026 interview with Chief Healthcare Executive, Amy Perry projected losses in supplemental payments of as much as $850 million for a health system that provides $1.2 billion a year in free care and services, and described a push to do more in outpatient care to cut acute care's cost. She was talking about 33 hospitals and more than 400 outpatient sites in six states, so her projection covered all of Banner. She also said Banner's emergency rooms had seen double-digit increases in visits over the prior year since the third quarter, which she tied to the emergency room being the only point of access uninsured people have to care.

For a Banner job in Arizona, the state's claim steps are set out in Arizona unemployment benefits, and Northern Colorado staff have Colorado unemployment benefits. If extended benefits coverage came with a Banner separation, how COBRA works covers the choices once that coverage ends, including what keeping a health plan can cost. And if Banner hands you a severance package to sign, severance negotiation goes over the terms people most often try to improve.