Health News Dozen: Top 12 U.S. Children’s Hospitals

Children with severe ailments and diseases need special care. Not only do they require a specialized staff that is equipped to deal with the emotional and physical needs that children need, but they must have the most advanced technology available for those of a younger age not able to handle the treatments given to adults for the same medical conditions.

Rating children’s hospitals requires looking into the various aspects of those facilities and their abilities to care for the youngest in society, from infants to teenagers. U.S. News & World Report has been ranking such facilities since the inception of its “Best Hospital Rankings” in 1990, but only in 2007 did it find access to the specific data to categorize them by specialty.

The top twelve children’s hospitals listed here are in the category of general pediatrics, but the other specialty rankings were not much different in that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Children’s Hospital Boston topped almost every list. The former was first in cancer facilities, neonatal care, and respiratory disorders, while the latter showed up in the top spot in the areas of digestive disorders, and heart conditions and heart surgeries. Only with neurology and neurosurgery did Johns Hopkins outperform the others and rank first, with Boston coming in second and Philadelphia third. Not only did the top three hospitals on this list score high, but in many categories, perfectly with a 100 rating.

Since children’s hospitals are generally behind adult hospitals in setting standards for researchers to analyze their performances, the research firm of RTI International had to divide them into specialties to properly process the information given. The basis for all of the research consisted of three major categories - reputation, outcome of patient care, and care-related measures, the latter of which includes such information as volume, nursing, and credentialing processes.

The information for the survey was taken of 143 American hospitals that responded to a direct survey in January and February of 2008. Information was also taken from a survey of board-certified pediatric specialists, and all hospitals had to be members of the National Association for Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions, though a few others were accepted into the survey based on previous high rankings or the recommendation of an expert advisory panel.

Data regarding children’s hospitals is important to the hospitals themselves so they can see what other facilities are doing and work to improve their own standings. Any medical facility aims to provide its patients with the best care available, and being able to see which areas of a hospital could do better enables the staff and management to better concentrate on those specialties.

Just as important, parents with children in need of special care are able to view such rankings as those from U.S. News and find the hospital that may best suit the required care of their young ones. While everyone certainly doesn’t have the ability to travel to the cities where those hospitals are located, it might make a difference to a child’s life and thus play a part in the decision-making of the parents, who will do anything in their power to get the best care for their children.