<i>U.S. News &amp; World Report</i> adds BH specialty to its analysis

For more than 15 years, U.S. News &amp; World Report has been evaluating America's top children's hospitals. Last week it released its 2024–2025 rankings of the best children's hospitals, and for the first time, added a new specialty to its analysis: behavioral health, the online news source for health care leaders, Chief Healthcare Executive, reported on Oct. 8. Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and a managing editor at U.S. News , said the addition of behavioral health to its analysis reflects the growing number of kids and teens coming to pediatric hospitals for mental health needs. “We've watched over the last several years, especially coming into the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, the rising behavioral health crisis, particularly among adolescents and children,” he added. “And so that really motivated us to make sure that we were putting information in front of families and in front of the public that would help them seek and find the care that they may need for a child.” Leaders of children's hospitals have said they are seeing an overwhelming number of kids with mental health needs. They said the uptick began before the COVID‐19 pandemic, but rose sharply during the pandemic. While some have said that the numbers have dropped from pandemic highs, they are still seeing more young people with mental health needs than they had before the pandemic. Many parents deal with long waits for a bed in a behavioral unit to become available, Harder noted. U.S. News sought input from clinicians in pediatric psychiatry, adolescent psychology and adolescent medicine, he said. There's also some overlap in those areas with kids having multiple needs.