2 Santa Monica Hospitals Ranked Best In CA For Maternity Care

SANTA MONICA, CA — Where their baby is born is one of the most important decisions parents make. In Santa Monica, two hospitals ranked among the Best Hospitals for Maternity Care for 2022-23 released Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report.

In the ranking of nearly 650 hospitals providing labor and delivery services, fewer than half received the “high performing” designation, the highest a hospital can receive for maternity care.

UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center and Providence Saint John's Health Center were among 48 hospitals in the state of California that received the “high performing” designation.

Each hospital participating in the survey received a scorecard describing their performance on a checklist of items parents look for when choosing where to have their baby.

Other nearby hospitals that completed the U.S. News survey, and ranked as “high performing” were:

• UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles
• Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles
• Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center
• Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical center

Regionally, Providence is ranked 17th in the state and ninth in Los Angeles. Santa Monica's UCLA Medical Center is ranked fifth in the nation for orthopedic specialty care.

"To be nationally ranked in a specialty, a hospital must excel in caring for the sickest, most medically complex patients," U.S. News & World Report said.

U.S. News said relatively little information is readily available to the public about which hospitals are best at caring for expectant parents after an uncomplicated pregnancy.

The ranking differs from other hospital rankings in an important way: The patients at maternity hospitals are younger, so the data used in the rankings was collected individually from the hospitals, rather than through required Medicare reports.

The rankings are based on C-section rates in lower-risk pregnancies, newborn complication rates, exclusive breast milk feeding rates and early elective delivery rates, among other factors.

This year for the first time as part of its methodology, U.S. News considered rates of episiotomy procedures (a small cut made at the vaginal opening to assist in difficult deliveries), rates of vaginal births of subsequent children after a Cesarean delivery, and whether hospitals met new federal criteria for “birthing-friendly” practices — a publicly reported, public-facing designation by the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity.

Also new this year, hospitals that tracked and reported their outcomes for patients of different races and ethnicities were rewarded in the rankings.

“Identifying racial disparities in maternity care is a vital step toward achieving health equity,” Min Hee Seo, senior health data scientist at U.S. News, said in a news release.

“The new measures provide expectant parents with many important data points, such as whether hospitals implemented patient safety practices, to assist them in making a decision about where to receive maternity care,” Seo said.