End the staffing & boarding crisis at UCLA Health
UPTE workers rally

UCLA Health has the money. UCLA Health lacks the will to staff its hospitals safely.

As of March 2025, UCLA Health held $2 billion in cash, with a current ratio of 4:1, twice the level the National Institutes of Health recommends, and what the NIH itself calls a failure to properly deploy available funds.¹ UCLA’s total endowment grew by $4.4 billion in five years.²

UCLA Health expects to more than double its net operating income by 2033, from $208 million to $515 million.³ And when UCLA Health overspent its FY 2024–25 budget by $179 million in just nine months, leadership blamed union strikes—not its own choices.⁴

Meanwhile, inside UCLA Health’s emergency departments:

• According to Healthgrades, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center does not rank in the top 10% of hospitals in the nation for patient safety, failing on 13 preventable patient safety events.⁵

• Patients wait on average almost 5 hours to be seen and discharged, 48.7% longer than the state average and 42.9% longer than the national average.⁶

• Patients leave the ED without being seen at a rate 150% greater than the state and national averages.⁷

• In 2023, ambulance diversion accounted for 51.5% of ER hours at Ronald Reagan—compared with a state average of 5.7%. At Santa Monica, diversion accounted for 26.1% of ER hours, compared with the state average of 5.7%.⁸

This is what the boarding crisis looks like, endangering patients and forcing workers to do more with less.

The UC Board of Regents is meeting on May 6. We will be there to make sure they can’t ignore us!

Footnotes:

1. UCLA Health, “Third-Quarter Financial Report (Quarter Ending March 31, 2025),” submitted to the UC Regents, June 16, 2025. The National Institutes of Health recommends a current ratio of 2:1 and warns that ratios beyond that level indicate that a hospital’s available operating funds have not been properly used.

2. UC Investment Office, Annual Endowment Report (various years).

3. University of California Office of the President, “UCLA Health Financial Projections,” presented at UC Regents Meeting, May 2024, https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may24/f1dattach4.pdf.

4. UCLA Health, “Third-Quarter Financial Report (Quarter Ending March 31, 2025),” submitted to the UC Regents, June 16, 2025.

5. Healthgrades, “Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,” 2026, https://www.healthgrades.com/hospital/ronald-reagan-ucla-medical-center-4474ca.

6. U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Care Compare,” https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?providerType=Hospital. Data are reported using median; average is used here for clarity.

7. U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Care Compare.”

8. California Department of Health Care Access and Information, Hospital Utilization Datasets (various years).