Three hospitals in Switzerland have been ranked among the 20 best in the world by a new report from Statista and Newsweek. Hospitals from Zurich, Lausanne and Basel all found themselves in the higher echelons.

Global Hospital Rating by Stastia 

To create the Global Hospital Rating, Statista ranked 2.300 hospitals in 28 countries around the world, to see which offer the highest levels of care. The organisation said it hopes to become the main guide to hospital quality and how medical facilities can improve. 

Writing in Newsweek, global editor-in-chief Nancy Cooper noted that “these are challenging times for hospitals. COVID-19 put unprecedented stress on health systems, as have inflation and global financial uncertainty… around the world, leading hospitals are dealing with rising costs, ageing populations and a medical workforce exhausted from battling a global pandemic.”  

While the data sourced varied from country to country, each hospital was rated using the following categories:

• Hospital recommendations from medical professionals
• Patient experience
• Hospital quality: quality of care, hygiene measures, patient safety, waiting times 
• Use of PROMs: Patient-Reported Outmeasures (in short, the use of standardised patient feedback)

Scores in each category contributed to a hospital’s final score, although each was given a different weighting - hospital recommendations accounted for 54 percent of the total score, followed by hospital quality (29 percent), patient experience (14,5 percent) and PROMs (2,5 percent). It’s also important to note - especially considering which hospitals made up the top 20 - that the ranking covers the quality of healthcare, not the cost or its affordability.

US hospitals rated the best in world for quality

For 2023, the top four was dominated by hospitals in the United States, with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester taking the top spot. Cleveland Clinic and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston rounded out the podium places - the top three have remained unchanged since 2019.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore) and Toronto General filled out the global top five, while the three best hospitals in Europe were the Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset in Sweden, Charité in Berlin and AP-HP in Paris.

10 best hospitals in the world

In all, here are the best hospitals in the world in 2023:

1. Mayo Clinic - Rochester, United States
2. Cleveland Clinic - Cleveland, United States
3. Massachusetts General Hospital - Boston, United States
4. The Johns Hopkins Hospital - Baltimore, United States
5. Toronto General - University Health Network - Toronto, Canada
6. Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset - Solna, Sweden
7. Charité - Berlin, Germany
8. AP-HP - Hôpital Universitaire Pitié Salpêtrière - Paris, France
9. Singapore General Hospital - Singapore
10. UCLA Health - Ronald Reagan Medical Center - Los Angeles, United States

The hospitals of the United States made up the largest group in the top 20 with seven American medical centres making the cut. They were followed by Swiss and German hospitals with three a piece.

Swiss university hospitals among the best in the world

Indeed, the first Swiss hospital is just a short trip down the ranking, with the University Hospital of Zurich named the 12th best in the world. It is the fifth year in a row that the hospital has made the top 20. The university hospitals in Lausanne and Basel also featured at the top of the ranking, placing 14th and 15th respectively.

Here are the best hospitals in Switzerland this year, as rated by Statista:

1. University Hospital Zurich
2. Lausanne University Hospital
3. University Hospital Basel
4. Hirslanden Clinic Zurich
5. Geneva University Hospitals
6. Claraspital, Basel
7. Hirslanden Clinic Aarau
8. Lindenhof Hospital Bern
9. Clinique Générale-Beaulieu Geneva
10. Inselspital Bern

To see how other hospitals around the world were rated, check out the official ranking.

Thumb image credit: Taljat David / Shutterstock.com