Associate Professor, Director PhD and MS Programs
UCLA School of Public Health

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772
Phone: (310) 267-2706
Fax: (310) 825-3317
E-mail: needlema@ucla.edu

Jack Needleman is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services, UCLA School of Public Health. 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.

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.