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Three Ohio children's hospital's are in the top ten overall
AKRON
Akron Children’s Hospital, with two facilities in Boardman, is ranked nationally in seven pediatric specialties, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2014-15 Best Children’s Hospitals report.
Its local facilities are Akron Children’s Mahoning Valley, 6505 Market St., and the pediatric hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit in St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Care Center, 8401 Market.
Boston Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia tied for first place on the Honor Roll, which highlights pediatric centers that provide high-quality care in three or more specialties of the 10 specialities rated.
Of the 89 ranked hospitals, 10 — including three in Ohio — earned a place on the Honor Roll, according to the magazine report.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC garnered national overall rankings of third, seventh and tied for eighth, respectively.
Akron Children’s, a teaching hospital, is one of 89 facilities nationally ranked in at least one of 10 specialties rated in the 2014-15 Best Children’s Hospitals survey.
Included in Akron Children’s national rankings are neonatology, No. 33, and orthopedics, No. 45.
A 372-bed children’s general facility with 9,453 admissions in the most recent year reported, Akron Children’s performed 3,316 annual inpatient and 12,025 outpatient surgeries. Its emergency room had 101,626 visits.
The information used to determine the rankings is provided by the American Hospital Association, which compiles data on all U.S. hospitals through an annual survey and from other sources.
U.S. News says in a release that while relatively few children face life-threatening or rare conditions or have to go through complicated operations, some do, and they need expertise that a typical hospital, where nearly all inpatients are adults, cannot provide.
Even a hospital with a busy maternity unit may not be equipped to deal with a newborn who weighs a few pounds or has a defective heart. Nor do most hospitals see large numbers of children with wide-ranging cancers or respiratory illnesses or kidney conditions. And even among hospitals that do, the reality, as it is for hospitals that treat adult patients, is that some places are better than others.
That is why U.S. News, in 2007, began using data to rank medical centers on their ability to help the children who most need it, according to the release.