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News Specialist Ed Yeates reporting"The Best Children's Hospital in America" ranking has come home to rest in our own backyard.
Primary Children's Medical Center made the top 10 list today in one of the most extensive surveys so far.
The survey began with more than 100 children's hospitals across the country - then narrowed to 54 - and finally to the top 10.
Three and a half year old Andrew Nelson has one of the meanest forms of cancer.
Like hundreds of kids with a variety of illnesses and injuries, he ended up here from his home in Idaho.
"Pocatello does not have a pediatric oncology unit anywhere. There is no pediatric oncologist in town. So outside of coming down here, I don't know where we would have been able to go," says Melissa Nelson, Andrew's mom.
Though Andrew's stay here is still touch and go, he's now in one of the top 10 children's hospitals in the country, at least according to the prestigious "Child" publication group.
They conducted one of the most extensive surveys, scrutinizing 72 arenas of health care from specialties and staffing to treatments and survival rates. The survey also included issues of safety, medication use, infection control and the rate of medical errors.
"What it does do is give us a national profile that we really haven't had. To be named with hospitals like Boston Children's and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia which are two of the oldest and have the longest standing tradition among children's hospitals in this country, really is a terrific thing," says Joseph Horton, CEO of Primary Children's Hospital.
Primary services a wide area in the West, and that's been expanding dramatically over the past 10 years. In fact, the hospital for now runs the highest occupancy rate of any in the state.
"We've been running at over 80 percent, in some months, 90 percent occupancy, particularly in the winter time. And that's really too high of an occupancy. It creates a real problem in trying to get all the patients in," Horton says.
Based on that demand, the hospital plans this year to increase its eight operating rooms to twelve and add another 20 inpatient beds.
