Women & Infants ranks No. 19 in U.S. for neonatal care

WOMEN & INFANTS HOSPITAL has been named the 19th best children's hospital in the country for neonatal care, one of four New England hospitals to receive that distinction in the U.S. News 2014-15 Best Children's Hospitals. / COURTESY WOMEN & INFANTS HOSPITAL
WOMEN & INFANTS HOSPITAL has been named the 19th best children's hospital in the country for neonatal care, one of four New England hospitals to receive that distinction in the U.S. News 2014-15 Best Children's Hospitals. / COURTESY WOMEN & INFANTS HOSPITAL

PROVIDENCE – U.S. News & World Report has named Women & Infants Hospital among the top pediatric hospitals in the country specializing in the medical care of newborn infants, especially those born ill or premature and requiring neonatal intensive care.
Women & Infants ranked 19th in the U.S. News report with an overall score of 73.8 out of 100 on the list for Top-Ranked Pediatric Hospitals for Neonatology, tying with John Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. The Providence hospital ranked especially high for prevention of NICU infections, minimizing 30-day readmissions and rate of infants breast feeding at discharge, but Women & Infants’ relatively low patient volume negatively affected its score.
As the birthing place to nearly 8,400 babies each year, Women & Infants provides care for high-risk newborns throughout southern New England. Babies born at Women & Infants represent 73 percent of those born in Rhode Island each year, as well as many from southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut, the hospital said.
In 2009, Women & Infants opened what was at the time the nation’s largest single-family room neonatal intensive care unit for critically ill newborns.
“The single-family room NICU has expanded the field of neonatology from ‘survival’ to ‘quality of life,’ and we have seen that first-hand in the five years since opening our single-family room unit,” said Dr. James F. Padbury, pediatrician-in-chief at Women & Infants and the Oh-Zopfi Professor of Pediatrics for Perinatal Research at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “Women & Infants’ NICU is a developmentally sensitive unit that enhances infant growth and development by allowing us to adjust the noise, light, temperature and medical interventions in each room based on each patient’s need.”
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia ranked first in the country, with a perfect score of 100, followed by Texas Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Children’s Hospital Colorado and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Aside from Women & Infants and Boston Children’s Hospital, the only New England hospitals recognized as top neonatalogical hospitals in the 2014-15 U.S. News report were Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, ranked at No. 37, and Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, ranked at No. 44.
Boston Children’s came out on top of the U.S. News lists for pediatric hospitals in cardiology and heart surgery, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology and GI surgery, nephrology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics and urology. Dana-Farber Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center was ranked No. 1 for cancer.
Women & Infants was the only Rhode Island hospital recognized in the national U.S. News 2014-15 Best Children’s Hospitals rankings.
Miriam Hospital, Newport Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital have been previously recognized by U.S. News for exceptional specialty services, but did not rank in the national report.
To view the full U.S. News report, which highlighted the top 50 U.S. hospitals in each of 10 pediatric specialties, visit http://health.usnews.com.

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