Laid off from Universal Health Services.

What Universal Health Services layoffs have meant for employees

Each 2026 notice is on file with a state. Laurel Ridge's went to the Texas Workforce Commission, which gave Behavioral Health Business a copy, and Provo Canyon School's sits on Utah's WARN list with its date, places and count. For anyone who was on either notice, that state copy is the official record of the date and the count. On a state's list, the name to look for can be the facility's rather than UHS's, since Utah lists this notice under Provo Canyon School.

Laurel Ridge's sequence is on the record. The hospital sued on April 23 and lost its bid for emergency relief on April 28. In between, staff got a letter laying off 648 of its 659 employees effective June 26. The layoff was set before the court had ruled. The lawsuit had warned that closing would cost about $48.5 million in annual payroll. Without federal certification the 330-bed hospital couldn't bill Medicare, Medicaid and many private contracts, a regional health care coordinator told county commissioners, according to the San Antonio Report, and UHS said Laurel Ridge was pursuing that status again. The administrative appeal the hospital started takes more than three years on average, Texas Public Radio reported, while the coordinator put the wait before it could even reapply at three months to a year. Both waits run longer than the two months between the letter and the layoff date.

After Utah revoked the Springville campus's license, its teens couldn't be transferred to the Provo campus, APM Reports reported, because that campus was already barred from accepting new teens under its license.

UHS has shut troubled psychiatric sites before. Timberlawn in Dallas said it would close a week after the state threatened to shut it down in January 2018, though its chief executive said the owners had decided in December, and it set February 16 as its last day of psychiatric services. The Dallas Morning News reported then that UHS had closed two adolescent residential treatment centers facing regulatory sanctions, in Virginia and Illinois, since 2012. The paper also counted at least five other UHS mental health hospitals in North Texas, going by the company's website. Desert Springs Hospital leadership gave other reasons for its 2023 cuts. As the hospital moved to end inpatient care, leadership cited an aging building, costly renovations, labor shortages and inflation, and its existing emergency department was expected to carry on as a free-standing ER for another 24 months.

What one campus offered didn't carry to the next. In 2023, Desert Springs' notice pointed staff toward openings elsewhere in UHS's Valley Health System. In 2026, Laurel Ridge's chief executive put the emphasis on employers beyond the hospital, telling a collaborative of mental health providers that the laid-off employees would be available for other jobs, the head of the Center for Health Care Services told KSAT. Laurel Ridge's notice ran from April 27 to June 26. That gave its staff 60 days, the transition period in which UHS said its support resources, career fairs among them, were being provided. How far the letter's bar on rehire "within that company" reaches decides whether applying to the rest of UHS's hospitals is even possible for the people it covered. If an interviewer asks how your Laurel Ridge job ended, UHS's own statement tied the workforce reduction to the regulatory action, which can anchor a short answer to that question. For Desert Springs in 2023, the reasons its leadership cited do the same job.