[Villages Kahuna]

Originally Posted by Wint1951

I get the impression after being here for one month, that all this building of new homes, so many people moving here and no actual plan of better health care exist. The Village Health centers are overwhelmed , cant even get registered with a doctor until the end of the year. Seems like no planning is going into this issue. I hope its not the case. I also understand the hospital ER wait is awful, especially in Snowbird season. I just hope i am totally wrong. What is a newbie to do, and as seniors we need good , reliable and quick health care. Again, I hope i am wrong, please tell me. Any ideas about how to get into a GP, or any clues as to how to see specialists?/ We are also young seniors so we are not on Medicare yet...

• Villages Health is well worth the wait. The doctors who work there are thoroughly vetted and, like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, they all work for salaries. The original plan was to have 8 primary care physicians in each of eight care centers. Each doctor would have a patient panel limited to 12,500 people--about one-third of the patients handled by other primary care physicians in the area. They really do spend time with you and get to know you. At last count they were above 40 doctors hired and on their way to 50. A lot of them have already reached their maximum number of patients. That and the fact that they can only take so many "initial visits" on their schedules while still treating their existing patients is what creates the wait. But like I said, pick a center near you, check out the readily available resumes of the available doctors, and make a future appointment. Well worth the wait.

• Yes, the Villages Hospital ER is overloaded. But the big construction project nearing completion there will dramatically expand the ER. Maybe the greater problem is the hospital's ability to hire top notch medical staff. It's going to take a few years, but the facilities themselves are first-rate. In time, the economies of running the hospital will result in attracting doctors whose skills will match the quality of the facilities. In the meantime, there's Leesburg Regional, Munroe and Ocala General in Ocala. That's where my wife and I will go if and when we need hospitalization. I wish we could rely on TVRH, but it's going to take them a few years to catrch up with the rapid expansion of their market. The pressure that the Villages Health doctors will put on the hospital management will be a big factor in such improvement.

• As far as planning is concerned, you're very wrong. There's all kinds of planning going on, much with the involvement of the U of South Florida medical school and also United Healthcare consultants. In fact, there is a rumor that in time TVRH will become a teaching hospital for USF. But when the population that you're serving is expanding at the rate of 7,000 to 8,000 people per year, there's almost no amount of planning that permit the hospital to keep up with the demands placed on it. As the growth of The Villages reaches its maximum in a couple of years, and the expansion of the hospital physical plant and medical staff continues, the overall quality of health care will improve in a hurry. But we're a few years from that right now and while the problems you've cited are real, they're also unavoidable.

• By the way, trying to blame the problems we're experiencing at TVRH on ObamaCare is a ridiculous allegation. Our problems are almost purely the product of an imbalance in the supply of hospital facilities and the number and quality of doctors to serve the rapidly growing population of The Villages. For the last couple of years TV was the most rapidly growing municipality of its type in the entire U.S. All kinds of problems can result from that, although most have been avoided by superb planning and management by our Developers. In fact, had the Developers not sold their controlling interest in TVRH, my guess is that the problems being experienced there would be minimized.