Quote:
Originally Posted by ExFed
I'm a regular reader of this forum, but I don't post much. However, I got an email yesterday from Medicare.com providing overall ratings and patient ratings for hospitals in our area and thought it might be of interest to some of you.
The ratings were between 5 stars for the best rating and 1 star for the lowest. I took a look and found the following ratings for hospitals in our vicinity and the results were as follows:
Villages Regional Hospital: Overall rating: 2 Patient rating: 1
UF Health Leesburg: Overall rating: 2 Patient rating: 2
AdventHealth Ocala: Overall rating: 1 Patient rating: 2
Marion Hospital Ocala: Overall rating: 2 Patient rating: 2
AdventHealth Waterman Tavares: Overall rating: 4 Patient rating: 3
Citrus Memorial Hospital Inverness: Overall rating: 2 Patient rating: 2
Please note that these ratings came to me from Medicare.com and I have done nothing to validate or invalidate the information they provided. Feel free to visit their website if you wish to fact check me or to further explore the accuracy of the data they provided.
Having personally been a patient only at Villages Regional Hospital on a single referral from my General Practitioner, my personal limited experience is that VRH is the worst hospital I have ever experienced. It may be that they were off their game that evening and my experience might be much better if I have future visits.
After my wife (a retired nurse) and I looked at the results, we are a bit worried that there doesn't appear to be a local hospital that we have confidence in using when the need arises.
I welcome any comments from those of you that have experiences at any of these hospitals that you found to be better than the ratings from Medicare.com.
|
While there are other ratings available from reliable sources, such as hospital accreditation boards, they tend to agree with the above numbers. This is why when I needed a hip replacement this year, I chose the top orthopedic surgeon at Advent Health Waterman, Jon Radnothy, even though the hospital is a 25 minute drive from my house. All my doctors practice there. The ratings are what sent me there.
Some of the ratings are due to a couple problems. The first is infections patients pick up while in the hospital, called “nosocomial infections”. Advent Health Waterman doesn’t have nearly as many because they are fanatical about avoiding them. Where they occur, it’s because of sloppiness when it comes to cleaning and sterile technique, with the resulting passage of infections to other patients. Back when people wore masks in public, I noticed that lots of people knew nothing about how masks work. They would have masks over their mouths but not their nose, or breath would come out the sides of the mask, or the mask would be too thin, or they would touch the outside of the mask and wipe it all over. Useless, pretty much. Similarly, hospitals have lots of custodial staff and nurse aids who are hard workers but know very little about germ theory and how infections are spread. Training these people is crucial if the infection rate is to go down.
The other big thing that hurts ratings is things like heart surgeries of various types and joint replacements done by doctors who don’t do them often or haven’t done enough of them yet. They may be board certified, and that is important, but still lack the experience that helps them make the right decision when an emergency occurs on the OR table. An orthopedic surgeon who does twelve total hip or knee replacements a week and nothing else will usually be better at it than an orthopedic surgeon who does all sorts of bone surgeries but only does a joint replacement maybe once a month. The ratings focus on these because they are illustrative of what is probably going on throughout the hospital in general.