UW Hospital and Clinics are ranked in the top 50 U.S. hospitals in seven medical specialties. That’s according to the 2010 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Hospitals” guide, something UW Hospital and Clinics Chief Operating Officer Ron Sliwinski calls an affirmation of the work people do every day. “There’s a lot that goes into rankings, they’re not a perfect measure, but they’re a very public way of acknowledging the work that people do,” Sliwinski says. “We did have high expectations to do well. We’ve been ranked every year since 1993.”
The U.S. News guide ranks hospital care in 16 specialties and Slwinski says the ranking in seven (Cancer, Kidney Disease, Ear, Nose and Throat, Orthopedics, Geriatrics, Pulmonology and Urology) may be the sort of thing medical professionals look at, when considering a move to Madison. “People are interested in working for organizations that have made a commitment to quality. And this ranking, as other rankings do, is a way for people to sort of get an insight into how the organization values high quality care.” Only 152 of the more than 4800 hospitals U.S. News analyzed, ranked high enough to be ranked in any specialty, including just one other hospital in Wisconsin.