The sale of the 90-year-old Warburton Hospital and Health Resort in Victoria, Australia, has seen all staff laid off.  The Seventh-day Adventist owned and operated institution was well-known for its wholistic health programs that attracted guests from around Australia, and for its hospital and emergency-care facilities that served the surrounding communities.

Originally, the staff—some 120 who work the equivalent of 70 full-time positions—expected to continue employment under the new owners. The new owners, however, have announced plans to close the institution for redevelopment over the next 12 months. Approximately one third of the staff are Adventist church members.

Chester Stanley, president of the Australian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, says that for many people, work at the hospital had been their “life and their ministry. No amount can repay the commitment and the energy that’s been poured into this place. I feel for the staff. What has happened to them is incredibly sad.”

The hospital was placed on the market for sale in January 1998. Contracts were signed in September last year, with church administrators citing financial difficulties as the reason for the sale.

“We had a large loan [from building the hospital, opened in 1994] that was difficult to pay because the hospital was rarely fully occupied, particularly in the past few years,”  said David Currie, then president of the Adventist Church in the region. “We also had no money, nor could we raise loans to refurbish the resort. It needed refurbishment to continue to attract the kind of clientele that would in turn be attracted to the hospital.” Estimates suggest that, in recent times, the hospital and resort have been costing the church in excess of $A50,000 a month.

“The pain is maximized,” says Stanley, “because you have a Seventh-day Adventist community built on Seventh-day Adventist institutions—there aren’t too many other job opportunities.”

Some 3000 people live in Warburton and the surrounding area. The church’s primary school will suffer, with parents of 26 students being made redundant. Yarra View Retirement Village and Signs Publishing Company are the remaining church institutions in the town. The church-owned Warburton Sanitarium Health Food Company factory closed in late 1996. “This is an environment ill-equipped to absorb these kinds of job losses,” says Colin Clark, human resources director for the Adventist Church in Australia.

The final guests will leave Warburton Health Care Centre and Hospital on March 14.