Outraged physician's assistant says she spent $30,000 moving from California to Texas for new job - only to get nasty surprise when she arrived

An outraged physician's assistant has claimed she spent nearly $30,000 moving from California to Texas for a new job - only to find out that the position was being cut when she arrived.

Mojgan Pedram says in a lawsuit that she had a stable job working in a California emergency room - but decided to take a position at Texas Children's Hospital because she is passionate about children.

'Everything was already set, and I relocated,' she recounted to Click 2 Houston. 

'I moved here and I was planning to, like financially start to be stable again, but all of it in a second was ruined.'

Pedram said she hired in April, and in late May, she went to the hospital to finish a health screening.

But Pedram said she then got a call from the hospital, telling her they were putting the job offer on hold.

'I asked them, "For how long have you been aware of this, and you didn't tell me?"' she remembers asking the hospital staff.

'And they said, "Well, it's been going on for two months," and then I was like, "I was offered the job in two months, so you were already aware. Why didn't you even tell me or inform me?"'

She said she had already spent about $30,000 moving from California to Texas, but that does not even include 'all the expenses about flying, you know everything like that, and then also having to find a place over here right in a short amount of time.'

Her attorney, Jacob Scholl, now says Pedram was a victim of the hospital's hiring freeze.

'The takeaway is that Texas Children's Hospital, in all of their bureaucracy, leaves their employees by the wayside,' he told Click 2 Houston.

'They don't seem to care about the decisions that they make and how they affect not just the individual employees, but the community and their family members as well.'

DailyMail.com has reached out to Texas Children's Hospital for comment.

But on Tuesday, it announced it was laying off 5 percent of its workforce amid a series of financial challenges.

Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Linda Aldred told the Houston Chronicle the hospital has about 20,000 employees across 120 locations - meaning that a 5 percent reduction in staff would cut about 1,000 jobs.

The cuts will be made to various departments, from frontline workers to leadership, the Chronicle reports.

Some of the employees who will face the layoffs are recent hires, while others have been with the hospital for more than 20 years, Aldred said. 

She blamed the layoffs on 'historic challenges' within the health care industry - including rising costs for both supplies and labor, and the end of pandemic-era health emergency declarations.

'Hospitals and health care facilities across the country, they're making this challenging decision. And that's where we really found ourselves,' she told the Chronicle.

'This has been such a hard decision for us.'

Aldred noted that the hospital considered other options, and even reduced the size of its executive team by about 10 percent before deciding layoffs were necessary.

Executives will also face pay cuts this fiscal year, she said, after the hospital reported an operating income loss of nearly $200 million through the first six months of the current fiscal year.

Multiple factors, including lower patient volumes in Houston and a two week delay in opening a new campus in Austin contributed to the loss.