St. Louis Children's Hospital Makes US News Best Children's Hospitals List for 10th Consecutive Year
Children’s joins eleven other hospitals across the nation on the list
Washington DC - June 5, 2012 - The U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll of Best Children’s Hospitals will again include St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which ranked in all ten specialties covered by the annual report. Only 12 children’s hospitals nationwide qualified for the honor roll distinction.
“St. Louis Children’s dedication and expertise reach across multiple pediatric specialties, as shown by its Honor Roll listing,” said U.S. News Health Rankings Editor Avery Comarow. “Our goal at U.S. News is to identify and call attention to pediatric centers like St. Louis Children’s that help the sickest kids.”
The report considered ten specialties: cancer, cardiology and heart surgery, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology, neonatology, nephrology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics, pulmonology, and urology.
Eighty hospitals across the country ranked in one or more specialties. St. Louis Children’s ranked in all ten.
“The professionals who track clinical excellence have once again taken notice of our physicians and staff for their exemplary and extraordinary work across the board,” says Lee Fetter, St. Louis Children’s Hospital President. “ It’s a point of pride for families in our community to have in their backyard a facility whose expertise and achievements attract sick children and their families from some 60 countries around the world.”
The Best Children’s Hospitals report provides unparalleled quality-related information in addition to rankings, including survival rates, adequacy of nurse staffing, procedure volume, and much more. Since its 2007 debut, the rankings have put an increasing emphasis on data that directly reflect hospitals’ performance over reputation.
The hospital’s success draws from its ability to provide more than today’s best medicine. “We provide tomorrow’s medicine,” explains Dr. Alan Schwartz, Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine and Pediatrician-in-Chief at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “St. Louis Children’s Hospital provides an immediate application for some of the most promising scientific discoveries at Washington University School of Medicine, its academic partner.”
“We believe increased emphasis on quality measures, like blood stream infections, helped elevate us in the rankings,” says Dr. F. Sessions Cole, Chief Medical Officer and Director of Newborn Medicine at St. Louis Children’s and Washington University School of Medicine, and with noted research on lung disease and pulmonary medicine. “We’ve implemented new strategies to reduce blood stream infections with dramatic results across our patient population.” Newborn and pulmonary medicine ranked 13th and 9th respectively.
“What distinguishes a successful program, from an exemplary program is the courage to go where the medical community has not yet gone,” says Dr. Pirooz Eghtesady, co-director of the St. Louis Children’s and Washington University Heart Center. “Over the past few years our program has been the first or among the first to deploy new life-saving technologies including artificial lung and heart pumping devices that have opened countless new opportunities for our colleagues across the country and around the world.” Heart and heart surgery ranked 13 in the survey.
This year, U.S. News surveyed 178 pediatric centers to obtain hard data such as availability of key resources and ability to prevent complications and infections. The hospital survey made up 75 percent of the rankings. A separate reputational survey in which 1,500 pediatric specialists—150 in each specialty—were asked where they would send the sickest children in their specialty made up the remaining 25 percent.
The full rankings and methodology are available at www.usnews.com/childrenshospitals. The rankings will also be published in the U.S. News Best Hospitals 2013 guidebook, which will be available in August.
St. Louis Children's Hospital has provided specialized care for children for more than 125 years. The hospital is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine, ranked the number four medical school in the country by US News & World Report. In 2012, St. Louis Children’s Hospital again made the elite US News & World Report Honor Roll of the nation’s Best Pediatric Hospitals, in additional to receiving Magnet re-designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center, the nation’s highest honor for nursing excellence. In 2009, Parents magazine ranked St. Louis Children's Hospital number five in the nation. St. Louis Children's Hospital is a member of BJC HealthCare. For more information visit stlouischildrens.org; or visit us @STLChildrens on Facebook and Twitter.
