In further moves to reduce ever-mounting losses, Jackson Health System announced Monday plans to close six units in January and lay off 93 employees.

Miami-Dade's public hospital group said it will close two transplant units, two other units at Jackson North and Jackson South, as well as two primary care clinics.

``It has been an extremely stressful few months,'' said Chief Executive Eneida Roldan in a telephone interview Monday. When she took over in June, she said she was facing a shortfall of $168 million this fiscal year. She managed to find $61.7 million in savings, but that still left a huge deficit.

``We're still in an unfortunate situation that we see deteriorating on a daily basis,'' she said. A bad economy has sent the number of uninsured soaring while revenue from sales and property taxes keeps going down. The hospital is funded in part by a one-half of 1 percent sales tax in Miami-Dade County.

At one point, there had been talk of passing the operation of Jackson's primary care clinics off to another group to operate them as federally qualified health centers, but that shift has yet to materialize, said Roldan, and facility rental problems are causing Jackson to close the North Miami Health Center on Northwest Eighth Avenue and the Juanita Mann Clinic on Northwest Second Avenue.

The system is also closing its liver transplant unit in Fort Lauderdale after deciding that it will be more economical to do all transplants at Jackson Memorial.

Also closing is the heart and lung transplant office on the main campus. Jackson and University of Miami physicians will continue to do heart transplants and lung transplants separately but will no longer do combined heart-and-lung operations.

Jackson spokesman Robert Alonso said there were only a couple of combined organ transplants last year.

The other closings involve the Jackson North mental health unit and the Jackson South wound care unit. In both cases, patients will be able to receive those services at other Jackson facilities, Roldan said.

Because the financial situation keeps getting worse, Roldan said she is still looking for other areas to save money.

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