Jack Needleman Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management
Associate Director, UCLA Patient Safety Institute
UCLA School of Public Health
Email: needlema@ucla.edu
Discipline: Economics
Expertise: Organization of Care
Investigator Award 
The Future of Public Hospitals and ClinicsAward Year: 1999 This project formulates public policy options for achieving continued access to care amid declining local government commitment to public hospitals and clinics. Using national and state data, Dr. Needleman analyzes trends in public sponsorship of hospitals and clinics and the consequences of closing or converting them. He also takes a close look at community efforts to maintain access to care following closure or conversion, assessing the effects of declining political support for the health care safety net and disillusionment with local government's ability to deliver health services. Based on these analyses, he creates a framework for discussing the future of public hospitals and clinics, describes the role these facilities play and the challenges they face, and identifies models for shaping the future of publicly provided health care.
Background 
Jack Needleman is a professor and chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management and is Associate Director of the UCLA Patient Safety Institute. He teaches courses in health policy analysis and American political institutions and health policy, and has previously taught program and policy evaluation. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University. Dr. Needleman's research focuses on the impact of changing markets and public policy on quality and access to care. Dr. Needleman has directed projects on a wide range of topics, including studies of the impact of nurse staffing and nurses working conditions on patient outcomes in hospitals and the cost and cost offsets of increasing nurse staffing, the quality of care for Medicaid beneficiaries with diabetes, and changes in access to inpatient care for psychiatric conditions and substance abuse. He has a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award to study the future of public hospitals. In other work, he has examined the impact of the Balanced Budget Act on safety net hospitals, nonprofit and public hospital conversions to for-profit status, and evaluated the impact of training on the ability of Peer Review Organizations to carry out quality improvement projects. He currently serves on the Nursing Advisory Council of the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. In 2012 was elected to the Institute of Medicine. Prior to coming to UCLA in 2003, Dr. Needleman was on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health and before that was Vice President and Co-Director of the Public Policy Practice at Lewin/ICF, a Washington health policy research and consulting firm. While at Lewin/ICF, he conducted studies and served as a consultant to numerous state and federal task forces examining health care costs and access to care.