Universal Health Services (UHS) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

April 26, 2022, 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day. And thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Universal Health Services, Inc. First Quarter 2022, Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to our speaker for today, Steve Filton, CFO. Please go ahead.

Steve Filton

Thank you, Mary. Good morning, Marc Miller is also joining us this morning. We welcome you to this review of Universal Health Services results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2022. During the conference call, we will be using words such as believes, expects, anticipates, estimates, and similar words that represent forecasts, projections, and forward looking statements. For anyone not familiar with the risks or uncertainties inherent in these forward-looking statements, I recommend the careful reading of the section on risk factors and forward-looking statements and risk factors in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021. We'd like to highlight just a couple of developments and business trends before opening the call up to questions. As discussed in our press release last night, the Company reported net income attributable to UHS per diluted share of $2.02 for the first quarter of 2022. After adjusting for the impact of the items reflected on the supplemental schedule as included with the press release. Our adjusted net income attributable to UHS per diluted share was $2.15 for the quarter ended March 31, 2022.

During the first quarter of 2022, our operations continued to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as pressures on staffing and wage rates. Specifically, a surge in patients with the Omicron variant of the virus, which began in December of 2021, tended to peak in most of our geographies in January of 2022. In our acute segment, we would note in general the Omicron patients were less acutely ill than the COVID patients treated in previous surges, and that's the square of lower acuity. Meanwhile, we now have contract nursing hours used, and even more importantly, the rates we had to pay for those hours increased significantly in the first quarter, both on a sequential basis, as well as a year-to-year -- at a year-to-year comparison. Although in our behavioral segment contract nursing costs did not increase quite dramatically, our inability to fill all of our labor vacant -- to fill all of our labor vacancies had a notable limiting impact on our patient volumes and related revenues.