Laid off from Mass General Brigham.

What Mass General Brigham layoffs have meant for employees

If you worked in management or administration at MGB in early 2025, the reorganization was aimed at your layer of the organization, wherever in the system you worked. Executives told the Boston Globe that internal studies had found more managers per front-line worker than industry benchmarks, and as many as 15 layers between front-line staff and the CEO in some places. When MGB announced in March 2024 that it would merge 34 departments across Mass General and Brigham and Women's, executives said they didn't expect job cuts. By February 2025 executives were describing the layoffs as integration work sped up by financial pressure, cuts that would otherwise have rolled out over years.

MGB's spokesperson said the cuts focused on nonclinical managers and administrators and that individual hospitals made the decisions with patient care in mind, in an April 2025 Globe report on patient-facing staff who were let go. In one case the system counted a Brigham social worker's role, which she said was direct patient care in a human trafficking program, as a management layer consolidated from two managers to one. At Martha's Vineyard Hospital, employees who spoke anonymously to the MV Times said most of those cut there worked in finance, on insurance referrals and billing recoveries. If your job mixed patient care with supervising others, the social worker's case shows how MGB classified one role like that. The Brigham said much the same in 2015, telling the Boston Globe its cuts would lay off no doctors, nurses or other staff working directly with patients.

Confidentiality agreements run through the accounts of two rounds. Some coders laid off by Partners HealthCare in 2018 told the Boston Globe they had to sign confidentiality agreements barring them from speaking to the news media in return for severance pay, which Partners said was standard. In 2025, a number of laid-off employees who'd signed confidentiality agreements declined to talk to the Globe for fear of jeopardizing their severance, and hospital sources told the MV Times that departing Vineyard workers had to sign separation agreements barring them from disclosing layoff details. If MGB's separation paperwork reaches you with a confidentiality clause, the 2018 coders' account records that kind of clause being traded for severance pay, and whether to make that trade is yours to weigh.

MGB has tried other measures before or instead of layoffs. In 2020, according to WBUR, it cut top executives' pay by a quarter, froze wages and retirement benefits for everyone earning $26.50 an hour or more, and suspended capital projects and limited spending, which it said would help avoid layoffs or furloughs. In November 2023 it offered its technology division buyouts at twice the standard weeks of severance per year of service and a 52-week cap in place of 24, and MGB's own document, as the Boston Herald described it, said the system would announce a reduction in force if it missed its voluntary-separation targets. Under those 2023 terms the standard package stopped growing at 24 years of service and the buyout at 26. If a buyout comes to your part of MGB, the 2023 terms offer a reference point, including a year's protection from layoffs for anyone whose application MGB turned down.

Older reporting, the 2018 coding cuts among it, calls the system Partners HealthCare, its name before Mass General Brigham. If your MGB job was in Massachusetts, the state's claim rules are on Massachusetts unemployment benefits. If it was at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in New Hampshire, where the MV Times, citing Foster's Daily Democrat, reported layoffs too, New Hampshire unemployment benefits covers that state.

A sourced history of Mass General Brigham layoffs

• March 2025, final wave of Mass General Brigham's reorganization

  CEO Anne Klibanski called that week's notifications the reorganization's final step, WBUR reported, and Faulkner Hospital's chaplain was laid off March 10, she told the Boston Globe. Two sources told the Nantucket Current that four Nantucket Cottage Hospital staff were cut.

• February 2025, largest layoff in Mass General Brigham's history begins

  Executives aimed to save at least $200 million a year by cutting management and administrative jobs that week and in March, they told the Boston Globe. Nantucket Cottage Hospital's chief nurse, the Nantucket Current reported, was among the first let go.

• December 2023, Mass General Brigham Digital cuts after buyouts

  MGB said it was cutting tech-unit roles affecting fewer than 20 people, in a statement Healthcare Dive reported, weeks after offering the division buyouts; an internal document the Boston Herald obtained said a reduction in force would be announced if MGB fell short of its targets.

• February 2018, Partners HealthCare outsources coding jobs to India

  Partners told about 100 employees, almost all medical coders, that they were being let go and their jobs sent to India, according to the Boston Globe; some said severance required signing confidentiality agreements, which Partners called standard.

• August 2015, Brigham and Women's plans to cut 100 positions

  Hospital officials planned to cut 100 positions outside direct patient care to save $10 million, through layoffs and unfilled vacancies, the Boston Globe reported, and froze hiring for non-patient-care jobs.

What to do if you're laid off from Mass General Brigham

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Mass General Brigham's biggest hubs: Massachusetts. Somewhere else? Every state is here.
• Apply for financial and hardship assistance. Unemployment supplements income, but food benefits, health coverage and utility help are often available as well. Here's some of what Mass General Brigham's hub states run: Massachusetts, and every other state is here.
• Mind the health insurance window. Losing coverage opens a 60-day special enrollment period, and an ACA plan usually beats unsubsidized COBRA. Compare your options before the employer coverage lapses, and read how the COBRA clocks run if you are weighing it seriously.
• Get your real runway number. Severance plus savings divided by reality. The calculator takes five minutes.
• Know which clocks are already running. Severance review windows, COBRA election, visa grace periods, and 401(k) rollovers all run on federal deadlines that started at termination. All five deadlines are here.