SGH ranked 8th and NUH 31st in Newsweek's world's best hospitals list

SGH was ranked 8th in the survey, with the NUH in 31st place. PHOTOS: ST FILE, KELVIN CHNG

SINGAPORE - Singapore General Hospital (SGH) has fallen five spots in Newsweek magazine's annual ranking of the world's best hospitals, but managed to remain in the top 10.

SGH was ranked 8th in the survey of 1,600 hospitals in 21 countries, with the National University Hospital (NUH) in 31st place. The first survey last year looked at 1,000 hospitals in 11 countries.

The top three hospitals this year are all in the United States: the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Japan's University of Tokyo Hospital, the only other Asian hospital to make the top 10 last year, fell to 18th, leaving SGH the only Asian hospital among the top 10.

The ranking was based on recommendations from medical experts, patient surveys and the hospitals' medical key performance indicators.

Newsweek said the 21 countries "were mainly selected based on standard of living/life expectancy, population size, number of hospitals and data availability".

The Asian countries assessed were India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand.

Asian hospitals that made the top 50 were Japan's St Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo (No. 16) and Kyoto University Hospital (No. 45) and South Korea's Asan Medical Center (No. 37) and Samsung Medical Centre (No. 42).

The magazine said 70,000 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses and hospital managers, were invited to participate in an online survey and a survey on its website. It did not state how many took part.

Participants were asked to recommend hospitals in their own country as well as in other nations, with own country scores accounting for 50 per cent of the total.

Newsweek said: "Given the complexity of the various data sources, it was not possible to harmonise this data."

Instead, it combined the number of international recommendations with the national ranking to give a global score.

It said official patient satisfaction data was not available in 13 countries, including Singapore, so evaluation from Google was used as a substitute.

It also said hospital key performance indicators were not available for nine countries, including Singapore.

The various scores were then validated by a global board of six medical experts - two from the US, three from Europe and one from Israel.

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