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.