PeaceHealth has filed a WARN notice with the Washington State Employment Security Department announcing it will eliminate 150 positions across Washington on November 20, 2026. Seventeen of those cuts are in Bellingham, affecting staff at two locations: St. Joseph Medical Center and the PeaceHealth Chestnut Building.
Who Is Affected and What Jobs Are Being Cut
Of the 17 Bellingham positions being eliminated, nine are at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center on East Chestnut Street, the regional hospital that serves as the primary acute care facility for Whatcom and Skagit counties. The remaining eight cuts are at PeaceHealth's Chestnut Building, a separate administrative and support location in Bellingham.
The affected job titles are concentrated in information technology: applications developers, field services analysts, client engineers, and network administrators. These are not clinical nursing or patient care positions, but rather the technical workforce that maintains the hospital's software systems, hardware infrastructure, and network operations.
PeaceHealth spokesperson Jim Murez confirmed in a statement that the organization is continuing a transition of several IT services scheduled to complete in November 2026. The final total of positions eliminated across Washington is expected to be under 250 workers, which PeaceHealth says represents just under 1.5 percent of its total workforce statewide.
The Outsourcing Destination and PeaceHealth's Assurances
The work being performed by the departing Bellingham employees will be transferred to Tech Mahindra, an India-based technology services company, and its U.S.-based subsidiary, The HCI Group. The outsourcing arrangement was previously reported by The Columbian, a Vancouver, Washington newspaper that covers PeaceHealth's Clark County operations.
PeaceHealth says that the level of technology support at its physical locations will not decrease as a result of the transition. The organization is framing the move as a continuation of ongoing efforts to manage costs while maintaining service quality. Healthcare systems across the country have increasingly turned to IT outsourcing as a way to reduce overhead, particularly in the wake of the financial pressures that followed the pandemic years.
Whether patients at St. Joseph Medical Center will notice any difference in how technical systems operate day to day remains to be seen. Hospital IT departments handle everything from electronic health records and diagnostic imaging systems to network security and the connectivity that links lab results, pharmacy orders, and clinical documentation together in real time. Those functions require reliable performance, and the transition period carries operational risk regardless of where the staff providing the support is located.
A Pattern of Job Cuts at PeaceHealth in Bellingham
The November 20 layoffs are not the first round of reductions at PeaceHealth's Bellingham operations in recent years. Earlier this year, PeaceHealth laid off 26 workers in Bellingham. Before that, in December 2025, 56 more positions were eliminated. Taken together, Bellingham has now seen nearly 100 PeaceHealth positions cut over roughly a year, a significant number for a healthcare organization that is one of the larger employers in Whatcom County.
PeaceHealth operates as a nonprofit Catholic health system headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, with hospitals and clinics across Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham is the system's largest facility in Washington and serves as a Level III trauma center and regional referral hospital for the northern Puget Sound region. The system's financial position has been under pressure as it works through pandemic-era debt loads, rising supply costs, and labor market challenges that affect healthcare employers broadly.
What Affected Workers Can Expect
Employees receiving WARN notices are entitled under federal and Washington state law to 60 days advance notice before layoffs take effect, which is why the November 20 date was disclosed now. Workers affected by mass layoffs may be eligible for unemployment insurance, reemployment services through the Washington State Employment Security Department, and potentially severance depending on their individual employment agreements with PeaceHealth.
For IT professionals in the Bellingham job market, the timing is notable. Whatcom County's technology sector is smaller than those in Seattle or Bellingham's larger neighbor to the south, which means local IT workers facing layoffs may need to consider remote work options or relocation to find comparable positions. Western Washington University's growing focus on health sciences and technology programs could over time help address the regional IT workforce gap, but that is a longer-term development.
Anyone with questions about the layoffs or available assistance programs can contact the Washington State Employment Security Department. For background on PeaceHealth's role in the local economy and healthcare landscape, earlier coverage has tracked economic developments in Bellingham affecting employment and services across the county this year.
