Boston Children’s delivers top-ranked care close to home

Boston Children’s Hospital, which operates its largest satellite campus in Waltham, landed on U.S. News & World Report’s 2026-27 Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll, one of only 11 children’s hospitals in the country to earn the distinction.

The hospital ranked first nationally in seven specialties: neonatology, pediatric cancer, pediatric gastroenterology and GI surgery, pediatric nephrology, pediatric neurology and neurosurgery, pediatric pulmonology and lung surgery, and pediatric urology. It ranked third in pediatric orthopedics, fourth in pediatric diabetes and endocrinology and eighth in pediatric cardiology and heart surgery.

For Waltham families, many of those top-ranked services are available 15 miles from the hospital’s Longwood Avenue campus in Boston. The Waltham site, at 9 Hope Ave., on the grounds of the former Waltham Hospital, offers office-based and surgical care in 79 specialties including substance use disorder, eating disorders, allergy, hearing and vision, orthopedics and sports medicine, urology, otolaryngology, plastic and oral maxillofacial surgery, neurology, neurosurgery, cardiology and sleep disorders.

Boston Children’s acquired the Hope Avenue property in 2004 and opened the following year. The site has since grown into the hospital’s largest and most comprehensive location outside Boston and the only one offering full-service MRI, CT scanning and inpatient beds.

Nearly 700 patients visit the radiology department each week. The campus includes six operating rooms, an 11-bed inpatient surgical unit, an infusion unit, a sleep clinic, an ophthalmology department, an autism assessment center and two inpatient psychiatric programs, including a 12-bed Community Based Acute Treatment program.

A multidisciplinary clinic added almost two years ago devotes a full day to a single complex condition — spina bifida, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy among them — coordinating all relevant specialists into one appointment.

Not everything is replicated in Waltham. There is no urgent care or emergency department, and some services require the Boston campus. Blood is drawn at an on-site phlebotomy clinic and couriered to Boston.

“Being recognized among the nation’s best children’s hospitals is a reflection of the extraordinary expertise, dedication, and collaboration of our teams, as well as the trust families place in us every day,” said Kevin B. Churchwell, the hospital’s CEO. “These rankings represent more than numbers — they reflect the children and families who turn to Boston Children’s for answers, and the collective commitment of our clinicians, researchers, and staff to deliver the very best care and advance what’s possible for children.”

The rankings are intended to help parents, in consultation with their children’s doctors, find pediatric care for serious illness, high-stakes surgery or complex medical needs.