Expectant parents scrambling to ready the nursery and find affordable childcare, sometimes defer one important decision until late in the game: Choosing where to give birth.
For anyone in that group or people planning pregnancies in the new year, this year's ratings of the "Best Hospitals for Maternity Care" by U.S. News & World Report offers a comprehensive cheat sheet.
The publication evaluated 680 hospitals' labor and delivery care units, focusing on parents with uncomplicated pregnancies. Instead of a traditional ranking system, the hospitals in each state were designated as “high performing” and “not high performing.”
The publication separately publishes rankings for “higher complexity care,” where patients may want to travel for treatment or seek a second opinion, said Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News.
The high-performing facilities had C-section rates that were 26% lower than other hospitals that participated in the survey, and newborn complication rates that were 37% lower, according to Jennifer Winston, a health data scientist at U.S. News.
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Hospital quality was also assessed objectively by looking at breast milk feeding rates, early elective delivery rates, birth-friendly practices and episiotomy rates, among other factors.
Out of the 680 hospitals that participated in the survey, nearly half received a "high-performing" designation. Facilities with top marks ranged from large, university health systems like Northwestern Medicine in Illinois and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania to smaller facilities like Thomas Hospital in Fairhope, Alabama.
For the first time this year, the U.S. News also gave special recognition to 73 hospitals serving communities that depend on them entirely for access to maternity care. These facilities provide care in areas that wouldn’t otherwise have access to maternity care.
Michigan had the most hospitals that were given this special recognition with nine facilities, followed by Minnesota and Pennsylvania, which each had eight hospitals.
“While growing maternity care deserts in parts of the country have left millions of people without local access to maternity care, these (recognized hospitals) persist in providing this vital service to under-resourced communities,” Winston said.
The latest ratings come shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's report last summer found maternal mortality among Black women had reached nearly 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births, which is 2.6 times the rate among white women, regardless of income and education.
While the report highlights maternity units that go the extra mile for patients, the state of care overall is not so rosy The March of Dimes, a decades-old health nonprofit centered on mothers and babies, gave the U.S. a D+ grade in its “State of Maternal and Infant Health for American Families” report last month. In 2021, just over one in 10 babies were born preterm, and that was true again in 2022.
Contributing: Eduardo Cuevas, USA TODAY. Send tips to Adrianna Rodriguez: adrodriguez@usatoday.com.
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