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Jack Needleman, PhD, FAAN

Jack Needleman, PhD, FAAN, is currently Professor of Health Services in the Department of Health Services at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health, where he is Director of the department’s PhD and research master’s programs. Before coming to UCLA, he was on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to that, he was Vice President and Co-Director of the Public Policy practice at Lewin-ICF, a well-respected health policy research and consulting firm.

For the past decade, nursing and quality have been a central focus of Dr. Needleman’s research. His research on hospital nurse staffing and patient outcomes won the first Academy Health, Health Service Research Impact Award. His work on nursing performance measurement has been used by the National Quality Forum in its Nursing Care Performance Measures Project. The Joint Commission, where he is one of the few non-nurses on the Nursing Advisory Council, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a member of national advisory committees for Promoting Partnerships in Nursing Education, and the invitational conference on The Economics of Nursing, among others. He lead the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s initiative Transforming Care at the Bedside, providing insight on how frontline staff-led quality improvement efforts influence patient care and the organization of work on nursing units. He helped design the evaluation strategy for measuring impacts on safety and reliability, workflow, work environment, and patient-centeredness of care. He is Co-Principal Investigator on the evaluation of the VA Nursing Academy, studying its impact on faculty recruitment, nursing class sizes, and nursing education. In recognition of his scholarship related to nursing, Dr. Needleman was made an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2007.

Dr. Needleman’s research also addresses a wide range of health policy issues in addition to nursing, and he has extensive experience using hospital discharge data, financial reports, and outpatient claims databases. His research comparing for-profit and nonprofit hospital performance and studying nonprofit and public hospital conversions to for-profit status has been widely cited. Dr. Needleman was a consultant to the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance and a member of its subcommittee on Societal Impacts of Uninsurance.

Dr. Needleman earned his PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. He has taught health policy, research methods, evaluation, and healthcare financial management.