About 700 more jobs will be cut at Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare by the second quarter as the nation’s third largest hospital operator pushes forward with a $250 million cost-cutting effort.

The layoffs — expected to mainly affect staff in hospital operations and corporate positions that support those facilities — are in addition to the 1,300 jobs the for-profit hospital chain announced it would cut last year.

Tenet's interim chief executive Ron Rittenmeyer — who took over last fall after longtime CEO Trevor Fetter's exit — announced the additional job cuts Monday at a conference in San Francisco.

"One of the fastest things you can do to move the cost needle is take a look top to bottom at costs and eliminate unnecessary work," Rittenmeyer said during a presentation to health care investors.

Under pressure from investors following a string of financial losses, the accumulation of more than $15 billion in long-term debt, big legal payouts and board shakeups, the North Texas hospital chain has been taking aggressive actions to improve its financial performance, accelerate growth, cut costs and try to avoid a potential proxy fight.

Last October, Tenet announced a $150 million cost reduction plan and eliminated 1,300 jobs, including an entire level of regional management in its hospital segment, its largest sector. Affected staff were notified last year.

Tenet later expanded its cost-cutting effort by an additional $100 million. The total number of jobs cuts will now reach about 2,000 by the end of the year.

Specifics about which markets will be impacted were not provided. But over the past year, Tenet has been selling hospitals, focusing more attention on about 10 core markets, El Paso and San Antonio, where it already has an expansive footprint or the potential to grow.

“Anything that’s not core to those, we’re going to probably exit over time, if we haven’t done that already,” Rittenmeyer said this week.

Earlier this month Tenet scaled back a two-year old, $288 million partnership with Baylor Scott and White Health, in which it was minority owner of hospitals in Rockwall, Collin and Dallas counties. Baylor is now planning to take over full ownership of two of them. Two others announced plans to either be permanently closed or sold. A fifth will remain in a partnership.

Tenet has also been reworking its supply chain and vendor contracts and consolidating office spaces as it flattens the organization and eliminates “unnecessary” work.

Last year, it put up for sale Conifer, a Frisco-based revenue cycle management company. Rittenmeyer told investors there is the potential to also spin off the company into its own entity.