Laid off from Tower Health.

What Tower Health layoffs have meant for employees

At Pottstown Hospital, the November 2025 round shut whole services, intensive care, cancer infusion and outpatient endoscopy among them, while the July 2026 round cut staff to match fewer patients and eliminated no services, Tower said. The drop in patients came after the first round. Pottstown had 5,104 inpatients in the nine months to March 31, 2026, down 9.7% from a year before, with most of that decline in early 2026, after the service cuts, according to data Tower shared with bondholders that the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The nurses' union, which said it still had 200 Pottstown nurses after the first round, said in July that it was pushing management for solutions protecting both patient care and those nurses. Alongside the July cuts, Tower said it would expand the emergency department and grow behavioral health to 52 beds from 28.

Some of Tower's job counts included positions that were empty or about to be. Of the 1,000 jobs Tower eliminated in June 2020, about 900 were held by employees and the rest sat vacant, PhillyVoice reported, while its April 2023 cut came to 45 layoffs plus 55 positions that were already vacant or would open up when people retired or left voluntarily, by the count in a December 2023 Inquirer report. So the jobs Tower announces can outnumber the people who lose them, and in 2020 and 2023 it gave the split.

The dates Tower gave for the November 2025 round didn't line up with one another. WHYY reported the Pottstown units would close by January 16, the Pennsylvania notice listed January 1 as its effective date, and the intensive care unit, which Tower had scheduled to close January 6, shut on December 24 because too few nurses were left to run it safely, a March 2026 Inquirer report said, drawing a citation from the state health department. If your position was among the November 2025 cuts, WHYY reported that affected staff were able to apply for other Tower openings across the system.

Tower has also moved work to outside firms rather than ending it, as with the revenue-collection work it contracted to Ensemble Health Partners in 2024 and the 35 information technology workers it moved to a vendor the year before, the Inquirer reported. When Tower closed Jennersville and Brandywine, it said it expected remaining employees to find new jobs at its other hospitals or at Penn Medicine, which owns Chester County Hospital, according to a December 2021 Inquirer report. Employment at the two had already fallen 20% in the year before.

Tower's operating losses after its 2017 purchase of five hospitals totaled $1.8 billion over eight years, the Inquirer reported when the November 2025 cuts were announced. In fiscal 2026, which ended June 30, Reading Hospital earned $212.2 million from operations, enough to offset losses at Tower Health Medical Group, its physician practices, which lost $160.4 million, and at Phoenixville Hospital, which lost $10 million, MyChesCo reported from the Philadelphia Business Journal's figures. Tower credited its better results to expense reductions, restructuring at its suburban hospitals and more revenue at Reading. Chief executive Michael Stern's November 2025 letter to staff, as WHYY described it, listed rising supply and labor costs, insurance reimbursement rates, more Medicare and uninsured patients and new Medicaid policies, and said that "continuing the same path is no longer viable." Tower's hospitals are all in Pennsylvania, and our page on Pennsylvania unemployment benefits lays out Pennsylvania's benefit amounts and the steps for applying.