How Does Your Hospital Measure Up
 

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.

Advent hospital in Ocala is our hospital of choice.

I guess it all depends on what you need the hospital FOR. They have some top-notch orthopedic surgeons at the VRH (which is now a UF Health facility). They're also RIGHT THERE, which is pretty convenient if you need inpatient care and live with your loved ones. They can visit you by golf cart, no need to stress out on a highway or major county road.

Marion county Hospital in Ocala for me

There was a prior thread that looked into how these ratings are actually calculated, and as I recall these may be artificially LOW due to the older population in this area having a much lower survival rate. I have not used the hospital, so I do not have any personal experience, however from comments I have seen if you can avoid the ER the comments were generally positive.

Well, there are 6,090 hospitals in the US. Somebody has to get stuck with the worst one. But it's no different than the NIMBY crowd for nuclear power plants or landfills----Not In My Back Yard----stick someone else with the worst

My only experience with any of those hospitals is the Villages Hospital off El Camino Real near Spanish Springs. There isn’t a rating low enough that I could give that horrible place. I would rather die than go through the experience again that I had there.

Even back in the 1970s when some of my relatives moved to Central Florida the medical care in the area was notoriously poor. They went back up to doctors in Maryland and lived into their 90s.

Can you be more specific as to what was so horrible?
Horrible is conclusory. Did they keep you waiting in the ER for 30 minutes before you saw a doctor? Or did they amputate the wrong leg?

If we know more facts, it will help us decide whether we should go there or look elsewhere. We can make an informed decision.

If someone said that a restaurant was horrible, I would like to know why. Was the soup cold or did you get salmonella?

West Marion for either myself or my husband! If needed, Summerfield ER!

After UF purchased the Village hospital are you surprised it is still getting such low marks?

Wife was at West Marion 18 months ago for surgery and was very impressed with their care.

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Hmmm, specifics. Try having a serious life threatening illness (not Covid), being in the worst possible agony imaginable, spending approximately 12 1/2 hours in a filthy ER, finally being totally misdiagnosed and sent packing (should have been admitted to ICU) to drive myself home to die, in a golf cart after midnight when I could barely walk or talk. When my wife arrived to save my life and got me to a real hospital in Gainesville (I couldn’t possibly drive myself), the triage team quickly evaluated me and rushed me to critical care. There isn’t a low enough grade possible for the ER at the Villages hospital.

Thanks. I will steer clear of it. I would think insurance companies would ban poorly rated hospitals from their networks. That might be an incentive for the hospitals to improve their services.

Wonder why they do not? Hit them in their pocketbooks would be a great incentive to improve

Quite the rainbows-and-unicorns article on VRH in today's Daily Sun...

OUCH......Not Good

Here's some great questions that need to be addressed first before
writing bad reviews on all hospitals.

Still shake my head over these one sided stories

Hello. Are you paying attention? Medicare is an insurance company! And low ratings do reduce the medicare reimbursement that hospitals receive.

Only you can answer those questions based on you’re health. If I was in poor health? 45 miles from Orlando or Gainesville IMO not good choice.

I’m surprised insurance lobbyist hasn’t written that into law. IMO there should be law if want sell insurance in United States they don’t make the rules and sell in all states or none. IMO I actually there should be one provider, the government, let government make billions and not private insurance and there CEO’s.

We should do a better job taking care of people but do not trust the govt to do a good job in this regard.

yes

I wonder how many Villagers would approve of a yearly $500.00. Tax solely for hospital improvement? This would not be biased on the value of your home, but every address pays the same amount for the betterment of health care in the Villages. If the answer is no, you are receiving the care you are paying for and should have no complaints.

My experiences with VRH were good and bad , a visit to the ER was a joke but my pacemaker implant surgery and stay was very favorable.

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.

I don’t normally chime in here but my wife also had an exceptionally bad experience at this hospital - she stated she’d rather die than go back. Staff didn’t treat her well (medically or personally) despite serious reasons & symptoms for entry - it traumatized her to be honest to some extent.

I’ve had to use the Villages hospital twice since May and other than a long wait in the ER (due to half the people being, shall I say visiting from the far, far south), my care was excellent. My second visit is recent, a three week stay where the staff was professional and very attentive 24/7. I’d give them a 4 rating. After that three weeks I was transferred to the Leesburg hospital for chemo and have been treated with excellent care. Remember, it’s only been about 2 plus years that the U of F bought Shands, the Villages and Leesburg hospitals. I think you need to know how ratings are achieved before making a judgment, such as how responsive are the short handed staff, is the food gourmet or are you expecting The Ritz Carlton treatment?
Leesburg is a step above, a 5, as my experience there is on the basis of specialized treatment.
So, while there may be better hospitals and staff elsewhere, I’d return to both of these facilities without hesitation. Remember, people who’ve had bad experiences vocalize louder than those with positive experiences.

Oh they do. Dont worry, their reimbursements are based in their ratings. Bad ratings means fewer dollars coming in.

Hospital ER
 

I believe one of the reasons The Villages hospital ER is so bad is they do not have ER certified docs on staff. This was confirmed by a question & answer forum by one of the execs. Can't remember her name. Who knows what qualifications these docs have.

I used UF Urgent Care and received awesome care. It's the people that make it work not the medicare ratings.

IMO all insurance does it might a pay bill. The government can do that.

West marion is great
 

My wife and I have both had inpatient and outpatient surgeries and tests at West Marion and love the staff and facility. Easy to get to and usually only 20 - 30 minutes away, from here in the north side of TVs. Where we came from, in central Maryland, it was 20 - 60 minutes to hospitals, so going to W. Marion is nothing.
We had very bad experiences at both Villages and Leesburg hospitals, the latter, father-in-law died following a successful shoulder replacement. Hospital staff allowed him to eat a meal immediately following surgery, before he was out from anesthesia. He didn't even know where he was yet, due to the drugs. He vomited, inhaled and dead 2 hours later.
We've got medical cards in our wallets, car and on the refrigerator instructing that if requiring hospitalization, we should be transported to West Marion. Our experience: 4.5 stars

On the Medicare ratings site the following caution is made:

"How should I use the hospital star ratings?
Star ratings can give you information and help you compare hospitals locally and nationwide, but you should consider a variety of factors when choosing a hospital, like physician guidance about your care plan. Along with the overall rating, you should look at other aspects of hospital quality like rates of infection and complications, and patients' experience of care based on survey results."

Many factors go into quality of care. All patient experiences are different but ultimately it's your experience that matters. That said, I think the patients' survey results are for me the best measure.

We go to Shands because of the past ratings and past family experiences

The article was partially correct, but incomplete. It states VRH is “fostering unmatched medical care for retirees”. What the article fails to mention is the health care is unmatched because it’s unimaginable anyplace else could be any worse.

Vill Hosp Care
 

I Agee, went to same ER on a Monday 4PM in Mid May, 20-30 others lined up. Checked in for blood clot on eye (per eye doctors) and waited till 7:30PM and left. Came back 8AM next day, waited hour and taken to ER exam room. Waited 1 hour for doc, routine exam, told to wait for some test he wants, CT Scan, Blood, MRI. Waited 3 hours got blood test. Now late afternoon, no food and little water. Late afternoon Nerologist (spelling) seen, told I was being admitted. For what I asked, observation they said. Put in room to wait for further test, told they were busy and short of staff. Got CT Scan. Got a sandwich and applesauce for dinner. I.V.s in and heart monitor on. Nurse tried to get me first on list for MRI, she succeeded on getting me in at 6:30 am, where tech said they were not busy yesterday. Oh!
No waited for some food, new un caring nurse asked for some food, she sniffled and half hour later got some cereal. 1PM Neorologist asst came in and wanted to keep me another day. Would not adjust meds or anything. I said I wanted out, she said no, I ripped the IV out of arm and heart monitor off and left. Fine ever since

Sorry you had to go through that, but totally not surprised. The saddest part is you had a relatively good experience, with short waiting times, compared to my horrendous experience on June 8th, 2021 (which went into the wee hours of the 9th).

It absolutely amazes me that so much attention is being given to getting quicker response emergency services. Why, so you can get dumped off at the Villages Hospital? Based on my experience at that hell hole, I would rather stay home and die.