Each year the US News & World Report ranks children’s hospitals. They send out a request for data from the hospitals and send surveys to docs around the country to gauge the reputation of each hospital. Many of the questions are the same from year to year but occasionally new ones are added. For the first time, this year the survey asks if the hospital’s Pediatric Neurosurgery Program participates in the Hydrocephalus Clinical Research Network.
We are very happy to see this. It means that the editors of US News & World Report consider HCRN participation to be important enough to include it as a criterion to evaluate children’s hospitals. But it is also validation for the importance of hydrocephalus treatment in the specialties of pediatric hospitals.