Quality and Safety

The safety of patients, families and employees is very important to us at Cook Children's. Providing safe, quality care is a key component of our Promise to improve the health of every child we serve.

Our chief quality officer leads a team that oversees quality and safety processes and procedures to ensure that our entire health care system is performing at the highest level possible. The team gathers data from every department and tracks outcomes based on a set of predetermined quality and safety goals. This helps us to identify where we're making great strides and where we can make improvements.

Cook Children's Medical Center and Cook Children's Home Health comply with the highest national standards for safety and quality of care to repeatedly receive The Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval.

In addition, Cook Children's is named among the ‘Best’ making the U.S. News and World Report 2025-26 "America's Best Children's Hospitals" rankings for excellence in six specialties, including Pediatric Behavioral Health, Cancer, Diabetes & Endocrinology, Neurology & Neurosurgery, Orthopedics and Pulmonology & Lung Surgery. Cook Children’s is also ranked #4 in Texas and #4 in the Southwest on the U.S. News and World Report “Best Regional Hospitals” list.

Cook Children's has also been named numerous times to the elite Leapfrog Top Hospitals list based on a national comprehensive quality and safety survey.

Cook Children's goal is to provide the highest quality patient care, in the safest possible environment, where the best possible outcomes are our top priority. Because patients and families are always at the forefront of everything we do, we focus on 5 key patient perspectives:

Keep me from harm
Heal me
Treat me with respect
Help me find the right care at the right time and place
Keep my community healthy

To meet these expectations, we focus on many quality initiatives to ensure we are providing the safest level of care. We continually track and measure data related to these key areas so that we can identify opportunities to improve care and processes. We strive to keep all children from harm and will continue to make safety our number one priority. Our goal is to reach Zero Harm, and our commitment to this is 100 percent.

Key quality measures

Quality care is key in our promise to improve the health of every child through the prevention and treatment of illness, disease and injury. In this section, we present data we collect in several important areas across pediatric primary care. Here are some of the key quality measures we look at:

The Joint Commission Accreditation

The Joint Commission (TJC) is widely known for its leadership role in evaluating and accrediting thousands of healthcare organizations in the United States. Cook Children's Medical Center achieved a three-year accreditation by Joint Commission on March 11, 2025. This accreditation means that we demonstrated compliance with Joint Commission standards and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) conditions of participation. TJC will conduct an unannounced survey every three years to validate ongoing compliance with all requirements.

U.S. News & World Report "America's Best Children's Hospitals" Rankings

U.S. News & World Report evaluates hospital performance in both complex and routine care for pediatric specialties. Cook Children's Health Care System has once again been recognized as one of the best children's hospitals in the nation, earning six rankings in the U.S. News & World Report's Best Children's Hospitals list for 2025-2026.

Cook Children's Medical Center overall rankings for 2025-2026 include:

Pediatric Behavioral Health - Top 50 in the nation
Pediatric Cancer - #41 in the nation
Pediatric Diabetes & Endocrinology - #35 in the nation
Pediatric Neurology & Neurosurgery - #33 in the nation
Pediatric Orthopedics - #49 in the nation
Pediatric Pulmonology & Lung Surgery - #48 in the nation

To create the pediatric rankings, U.S. News and World Report gathers key clinical data from nearly 108 medical centers through a detailed survey that looks at measures such as patient safety, infection prevention, adequacy of nurse staffing, survival rates, performance in complex procedures, adherence to best practices, advanced medical technologies, specialty-specific certifications and services, and health outcomes. In addition, the rankings incorporate expert opinion from thousands of board-certified pediatric specialists, who are surveyed annually about where they would send the most critically ill children in their specialty.

In the 2025-2026 edition, only 88 children's hospitals were ranked in at least one of the evaluated specialties.