Ochsner Hospital for Children sits on the main campus of Ochsner Medical Center in Jefferson, Louisiana, immediately adjacent to New Orleans. It is a 125-bed children's hospital that has been ranked the #1 children's hospital in Louisiana for three consecutive years and holds a top-50 national ranking from U.S. News & World Report for Pediatric Cardiology and Heart Surgery. These rankings are not ceremonial. They reflect measurable outcomes from a program that performs over 200 open-heart surgeries per year and posts surgical results that benchmark nationally against the best programs in the country, according to Society of Thoracic Surgeons data.
The children's hospital operates within Ochsner Health, the largest nonprofit healthcare system in Louisiana and across the Gulf South. Ochsner was founded in 1942 when Dr. Alton Ochsner and four colleagues opened New Orleans' first multi-specialty group practice with a mission to provide personalized, comprehensive care. More than 80 years later, the system has grown to 47 hospitals and more than 370 health and urgent care centers, with 3,484 licensed beds across the network. In 2024, more than 40,000 team members and 4,900 employed and affiliated physicians cared for 1.6 million people from every U.S. state and 63 countries. Ochsner has ranked #1 in Louisiana for 12 consecutive years.
The current children's hospital is a purpose-built inpatient facility with attending-level 24/7 in-house coverage across every major specialty: emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care, cardiac critical care, and neonatal. The campus includes:
Ochsner Hospital for Children is one of the few institutions in the country where you can practice pediatric cardiac critical care with full subspecialty support immediately available under one roof. The congenital heart program is not just a service line. It is a nationally recognized program with outcomes comparable to top-tier academic centers:
The Gayle and Tom Benson Cancer Center is clinically integrated with MD Anderson, creating access to oncology protocols and multidisciplinary care that few community or regional systems can match. Additional cardiac subspecialty support includes electrophysiology, adult congenital heart disease, and advanced cardiac imaging, all available within the same program.
Ochsner is breaking ground in 2024 on a new children's hospital located west of the main hospital, connected by sky bridge. The new facility is designed to support Level 1 or Level 2 Pediatric Trauma Center designation and will include:
The physician joining this program now will be part of building the team that occupies that new unit. Equipment selection, unit culture, staffing models — those decisions are being made now, and the incoming physician will have a voice in them.
Ochsner is a physician-led organization and the largest non-university based academic medical center in Louisiana. The graduate medical education environment is active, with residency and fellowship programs across multiple specialties. A new pediatrics residency program is set to graduate its first class in 2027. The Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine will welcome its inaugural class that same year, transitioning Ochsner into a full academic health system with end-to-end physician training.
There is no publication pressure in the CV-ICU. Teaching and clinical engagement are genuine expectations; research and scholarship are welcome but not required.
Ochsner's mission is direct: serve, heal, lead, educate, and innovate. The values underpinning daily work, patient first, integrity, compassion, inclusivity, excellence, and teamwork, are not wall art. They define how the CV-ICU functions: attending-led, APP-supported, interprofessional care with genuine communication across surgery, cardiology, intensivists, nursing, pharmacy, and respiratory therapy.
The annual report is available at: https://ochsner-craft.s3.amazonaws.com/doctors/Ochsner-Health-2024-Annual-Report.pdf