Well said...

so sorry you had to deal with all that incompetence. Unfortunately it seems to be the norm for that hospital. We deserve MUCH better.

I went to a stand alone ER on 44. They had a ct scanner but no mri. Do you know if the place on 466a has both?

I’ve been told to always go to an er physically connected to a hospital, but those are further away. I don’t know when time is more important than full quality of care.

If it's an actual emergency, I'd go to the ER closest to home if spouse is driving, or wherever the ambulance takes me, if he's not driving. If I'm able to drive, then it's not an emergency.

Yes you may.

Ohiobuckeye
 

I myself totally agrees with you! Service was terrible 9 1/2 yrs. ago & it must not be any Breyer yet. I got a bill for almost $4,000. & we went & cplained to the CEO of the hospital, this lady very politely tore our bill up & said I’ll take care of it. She heard so many things that were forbidden that she was almost embarrassed to tell us that that was a no-no. I won’t get into a very long story but TV hospital should be closed, I wouldn’t trust SOME of the help there or SOME Drs. with my pet ANT. I cut the end of my thumb off with a potato slicer & went to Emergency care in Leesburg, I know some people might not like Leesburg either but they were the nicest professionals I’ve ever had not like the mental hospital help in TV. If you have an emergency & can make it go to Leesburg or Ocala. I guess from reading these comments at least people know the TV hospital is not the place to go to for emergency help unless you’re going there to get your Death Certificate!

Now look at me. I have yucky stuff all over my new tenneys.

HIPPA violation should be reported to the appropriate agency. Shame on them. I hope everybody reading this knows IT'S YOUR PATIENT RIGHT TO REQUEST A PRIVATE CONSULTATION, not one in front of anyone else. I would also report your experience to the CEO of UFHealth. If you don't, this doctor will continue violating the HIPPA law. I'm sure the CEO will deal with the situation because they could lose federal funding. It's a very bad practice and all medical personnell are trained and fully aware of the consequences of violating this law.
Next time go to Urgent Care possibly? They will take time to examine you better and have a discussion with you about getting an MRI since xrays do not show tears. A lawyer would need to prove that the doctor in the ER caused you some kind of bodily harm that would impact the rest of your life. I know that because I helped my sister with a law suit and even when you have a solid case, it's difficult. So sorry you had to suffer in pain and still not receive proper care. Hope you are pain free and recovering nicely, now, or after your surgery.

My wife and I had a similar experience a few years ago. It was so bad that we left after three hours after they took in a young lady for a pregnancy test before my wife. It's sad to see nothing has changed. Worst experience ever.

You have a valid complaint that should be reported. Complaints should start with the Privacy Officer at the facility and/or OCR (Office of Civil Rights).
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services - Office for Civil Rights

Maybe they already knew your wife wasn't pregnant.

:1rotfl::1rotfl::1rotfl:

Now that one is funny.

Transported to Ocala as Villages ER is not equipped for possible stroke
 

I was in my doctor's office in the Sharon Morse Building across the parking lot from The Villages Hospital. I was having what appear to be stroke-like symptoms and my doctor ordered an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I questioned why they could not just wheel me across the parking lot to The Villages ER and was advised that the Villages Hospital is not a level one stroke Hospital. How crazy is that in a community filled with senior citizens. It took the ambulance 45 minutes to get to the Sharon Morse Building despite three different calls from my doctor's office. Another 35 minute drive to Ocala. When is The Villages Hospital going to get up to speed? I thought when it was taken over by the University things were going to improve but obviously not. When you have an emergency, time is critical. I ended up being admitted to the hospital in Ocala. I am so disappointed in The Villages Hospital.

!7-year ER nurse here. OP has some valid points, some misperceptions, and some ER care expectations that will never be met.
1. EDs are for emergencies. i.e. conditions w onset of <24 hours and/or threatening life, limb, or organ function. Admittedly, the misuse of ED services was my biggest complaint w people. We were so busy w true emergencies there simply wasn’t time to devote to conditions that belonged in a physician’s office. Wait time is the #1 complaint from ED patients. Yours simply wasn’t an emergency so your wait time complaint is moot.

2. Rudeness from staff is never acceptable. I wonder what caused the first two people you interacted w to treat you so poorly. I think most people are in health care to help, not to use as an opportunity to mistreat others. But as w all occupations, there are always exceptions.

3. Surely you were not directed by the greeter to go directly to the registration clerk where detailed insurance info was obtained? Were you first triaged for a medical emergency where it was determined none existed? A Federal law called EMTALA requires that any person requesting evaluation receive a medical screening eval (MSE) prior to being asked for detailed insurance info. Had your triage revealed a medical emergency you would have received a MSE before giving detailed insurance info. EMTALA has been in effect for years, so I must assume TV EDs are aware as the fines for violating can be huge. If you were not triaged prior to providing detailed ins info, please advise the hospital’s CEO, Compliance Officer, Risk Manager or Patient Advocate, they will want to know about this.

4. ED doc meeting family in the waiting room could potentially be a HIPAA violation. Did you hear any PATIENT-IDENTIFIABLE info? Were you able to identify the patient by way of any info the doc divulged? If so, go to those in charge at the hospital and let them know they have a problem. If the doc was discussing diagnosis, care plan etc. but you don’t know who he was talking about, it’s not a HIPAA issue, it’s a respect issue.

5. X-rays don’t diagnose soft tissue injuries; ligaments are a soft tissue. MRIs that can diagnose soft tissue injuries are simply not ordered by the ED docs for non-emergent conditions. Standard ED operating process: the ED doc rules out a medical emergency and the patient is told to return to the ED if symptoms worsen, and to follow with PCP if symptoms persist. EDs deal with emergencies.

6. Name of an attorney: IMHO you don’t have a case. Nothing. Sorry. What are your damages? The next day you were diagnosed with an ACL tear, what did that 1-day delay in diagnosis cost you? Surely you had even more delay until repair: you had to wait to see an ortho doc on referral. Then you had to wait until your scheduled surgical repair (ACLs torn in half require surgical repair, in my experience). So how did the initial 1-day delay harm you? The ED doc didn’t cause your ACL tear. You still would have required appropriate treatment for the tear. Was the care required altered by the 1-day delay? Got to have an injury caused directly by a negligent act to have a successful malpractice claim. There is no provision under the law for YOU to sue anyone for any HIPAA violation. It is our government that brings those actions against the covered entity.

While there are deserved malpractice actions brought against care providers, I’m sad that this action is the first thought when something doesn’t go just as you thought it should. I just wish people would give usually well-intentioned people the benefit of the doubt before a public trashing.

It's HIPAA. Not HIPPA. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. H.I.P.A.A.

Also, you do have the right to ask for a private consultation. You also have the responsibility to ask for one, the doctor says he wants to tell you something, while you're in a room of other patients. He wasn't suffering, he got help. He just "woopsie" left out that part in the OP, and clarified it after a few pages of responses.

The Emergency Room is not the appropriate place to go if your life is not in danger.

:bigbow::bigbow::bigbow:

Perhaps the young lady had signs/symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy, which is life threatening. Patients are not seen in they order they arrive, they are seen in the order of who is most at risk at that moment.

They'll get "up to speed" when they meet these criteria:

if their stroke center doesn't see at least 250 stroke patients per year, they cannot qualify as a level 1 stroke center.

The main problem at TVRH is they do not have an Emergency Department, just an Emergency room. Might sound like a trivial thing but having done a stint as administrative staff at the American College of Emergency Physicians a few decades ago, I can tell you it makes all the difference to have staff that report to a Department Director daily versus contract help who come and go. TVRH is big enough and with a population large enough to warrant an ED. Hopefully UF will work on this as Emergency is the first line of contact at the hospital for potentially life threatening cases.

I'll share my own experience with the TVRH Emergency team. 2/4/16, I felt fine all day and went out to dinner about 6 PM. Felt a little tired and not all that hungry so ordered soup and salad. Took a couple bites and suddenly started shivering and felt flushed with fever. Couldn't eat, thought I picked up a bug, went home to bed. About 3 AM my gut was in agony. Got up and drove to TVRH. Being 3:30 AM, was taken back quickly. CAT scan run and RN administered a morphine shot. Was surprised when I still said registered about 5 on a 1-10 scale. Attending comes in and says CAT scan negative so must be gastroenteritis . Get sent out at 8:30 AM with scrip for several meds.

Actually start to feel better 2 days later. Then get a call that the CAT was read wrong and I have a ruptured appendix. Person on the phone wants to know if I want to come in or deal with it when I go back North.?? Ruptured appendix!!

I head right back to TVRH, tell them why I'm there and wait over 2 hours to be called back for another CAT which confirms ruptured appendix. Immediately rushed back for surgery.

Once in hospital care, a totally different world, excellent surgery and post-op care. Surgeon tells me I was very lucky as the rupture had been encapsulated in a pocket. Without that fact, I might not be here today. So, my choice if another medical emergency were to occur would not be TVRH until they deal with and fix their front line triage unit.

Not a sound grading method though, I don't put my eggs in that scorecard basket.

A hospital is dinged for superficial infections (skin) that develop up to 30 days from date of the surgery, and for deep or organ/space infections that develop up to 90 days after the surgery . Too many factors that the doc nor hospital can control once patient is discharged to home e.g. is patient taking antibiotics properly, keeping wound clean/dry, are they smokers, is the diabetic controlling their blood sugars. I dealt w a patient who developed a deep wound infection about 21 days after lumbar surgery, and it was a nasty one. My hospital was dinged for the infection simply bc of the timing. The patient blamed the surgery. We looked at every component of infection prevention utilized in the OR for that case, everyone did everything that was required, still the patient developed a debilitating infection. It is noted in the patient's record that he reported to the Infectious Disease physician, "approximately one week after his laminectomy, he began to use his dog's wire brush to scrape away the scab and scratch his surgical incision". The bug infecting his wound was an odd one (I can't recall its name) but this bacteria is associated with acne and is also found on the coats of dogs. The patient blamed the surgical team, he believed someone had facial acne and dropped bacteria into his open wound. We did look into that, some had blemishes, but no cases of acne amongst the surgical team. The patient wouldn't even consider that his dog's brush transferred the bug into his wound. We'll never know for sure either way but the hospital bears the ding on its scorecard to this day.

Another fault with this grading system, if the patient's initial surgery was at Hospital A and the patient goes to Hospital B for treatment of a post-op wound infection, Hospital A, nor the surgeon performing the surgery, is dinged w the infection on their scorecards. One hand doesn't know what the other hand is up to. I think this gaping hole is a huge problem for a couple of reasons.

Bottom line, you can't put all your faith in publicly reported data, it's a less than perfect system.

You also can't put much stock in what you read on social media sites. IMHO, your best bet is to ask a friend working in your local healthcare facilities, we know which hospitals, or even which units within hospitals to avoid. We know which practitioners deserve your trust, and we def know which practitioners are to be avoided.

ER docs generally do not interpret radiology images. In this 21st century, even images at 0330 can be electronically transmitted to an on-duty Radiologist who provides the interpretation. I don't know that TV hospital has such a contract in place (it's hard to imagine they don't), but before continuing to blame the ED you really should ascertain who misread your images. Misreads do happen, the interpreter is a human being and it isn't a matter of if a human will make a mistake, it is a matter of when. I'm glad you came out of your ordeal unscathed, you surely have a guardian angel, good karma, good juju, or just plain ol good luck.

Were you perhaps thinking of corynebacterium???

I agree, many of the metrics that go into the hospital "rating" (which btw is nothing more than to amuse the lay public, real problems are addressed in a different manner), are just plain bogus. My favorite is the "medication error" rate. If I prescribe a Tylenol for 6 PM, the nurse has to administer it between 5:30 and 6:30. if it is 1 minute late, it is counted as a medication "error" . What's worse, is that if the patient goes on to die during that admission from their underlying stage 4 pancreatic carcinoma 2 weeks later, the bean counters call that a death due to "medical error". And that's why they put out these absurd numbers like 500,000 people in the USA die from "medical errors" each year. It is, of course, complete nonsense, but it fits the political narrative that seems to be popular. As Chief of Staff, I always loved to report this crap to NY State:1rotfl::1rotfl::1rotfl:
The other problem is that some hospitals are more diligent in reporting than others, so the whole baseline can be skewed. The conditions the bean counters focus on are myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accident and pneumonitis. They have so much garbage built into the criteria that it is almost medically meaningless, but again, it "shows the public" that the government is looking out for them.
Another rating metric that I also love is "readmissions within 30 days" for the same problem. A patient is admitted and treated successfully for CHF (congestive heart failure), and discharged home, where they proceed to eat 15 grams of sodium a day, so naturally they are back in 3 days. Somehow the bean counters consider that the fault of the hospital. Go figure!

Amen to all that you wrote! After my 17 years in ED, where I burnt out simply due to the constant high-stress environment, and the utter lack of respect from so many patients/families (not all, many though), I started a new career as a risk manager. Hats off to you for lasting 40 freaking years in the ED! And thank you! Once in risk management, I worked at a 300 bed community hospital and onward to a 900 bed tertiary care center. I lasted 21+ years in that role. Healthcare Risk Management is a small world, I knew my counterparts across the country and we talked. I'm here to tell people, bigger does not equate to better. Every hospital, regardless of its size, has exactly the same issues related to quality of care and the same battle w the community's perception of that quality of care. Some hospitals are just more transparent. And what you mentioned, all the public data, is camouflage, not fixes. And the data is worthless. Now that I'm "retired" I'm working for a med mal defense law firm. But what I really want to be is a bartender.

There was some kind of reality-based medical show several years ago, and on one episode, they looked at a guy who had repeat visits to the ER due to a dislocated shoulder. They'd pop it back in place, send him home with a Rx for pain meds, and he'd be back a few weeks later with a dislocated shoulder again.

Turned out he was addicted to painkillers and kept dislocating his shoulder on purpose just to get the prescription.

Imagine the ding on that hospital's record on just that one patient.

It was acin.... something or another. I'm just happy I can't recall, I thought I'd never forget any detail of that experience.

Acinetobacter baumannii? It is a frequent etiologic agent of nosocomial infections, can colonize skin, tends to rapidly develop antibiotic resistance. I'm not sure if it , despite the similarity in names, cause acne. And I like the idea of becoming a bartender

PS. I wasn't an ER doc. I was an internist, but in private group practice at a 300 bed community hospital, so I spent plenty of time in the ER admitting patients since for most of my career we didn't have hospitalists. Previously, (in the stone age before ER residency trained docs), I did run the ER in a 700 bed NYC hospital for 2 years. I was also at various times chairman of QA, chairman of P&T, and chief of staff, as well as associate professor of medicine at SUNY medial school. So in general, I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about (but apparently some believe my expertise is not as extensive as someone who does a 3 minute google search:1rotfl::1rotfl::1rotfl:)

Villages Hosp. ER
 

I have had similar experience. My advice is to go to the WALK-IN MED OFFICES, espec. OCALA HEALTH ON 466A. EXCEL. CARE! QUOTE=ScottS;1951893]I recently had the misfortune of having to use the Villages ER. Absolute worst experience of my life. We arrived at apx 5:15 pm. We were treated extremely rudely by the elderly gentleman registering patients. We first had to ask if that was the line, as there really was no formal line. His tone and customer service were appalling. And yes he was a paid employee and not a volunteer. We then were directed to the billing person, who was also untrained and very rude. She asked for my insurance information. I handed her the workman’s comp form which had all the info needed. She handed it back and said she needed my insurance card. After pointing out this was a workman’s comp claim and this was not going on my personal insurance, she snatched the papers back out of my hand and complained that she did not know how to file a workman’s comp claim. My wife quickly took me to a seat as she could tell I was about to snap. So 2 hours later we are taken back to get an X-ray on my injured right knee. After completing the X-rays we are taken back to the waiting room. After 3 more hours apx 11:00, the ER doctor makes an appearance, he starts sitting with the 8 or 9 people in the waiting room and discussing all of their medical issues right there in the waiting room amongst everyone there. They use to have this thing called Hipaa, apparently that doesn’t exist here in the Villages. By midnight it was finally my turn to have my medical issues discussed aloud in front of everyone. He diagnosed me with a bad knee sprain, ordered me some pain killers, a knee brace and crutches. At 1:30 my wife was tired of waiting and went to check on the above items. 3 times I was asked my height. 3 times they were told 5’9”. They brought out crutches and a knee brace that the lowest adjustment was for someone 6’2”. At 2 am I stormed out the front door with nothing that fit, and no pain meds as all the pharmacy’s are closed and they don’t give medications out at that ER. What a joke! Turns out, after going to a real doctor the next day, that I had a completely torn in half ACL. NOT A BAD SPRAIN! If anyone knows of a good lawyer I would love their name, as hipaa laws were broken, the misdiagnosis without out even doing an MRI was reckless. I even asked him why they weren’t doing an MRI, to which he responded we don’t do those here. What??? Are you kidding me? So after being there for about nine hours, we were worse off than when we got there, and the sad part is they will still get paid.[/QUOTE]

It was read by on duty staff that night and reread by a radiologist the next day. Not a good way to diagnose plus it took another day for them to contact me. And I agree, somebody was looking out for me!

Maybe Not the CEO of Emergency Services?
 

Maybe Not the CEO of the Emergency Department?
I do not know details about the corporate structure of this hospital:
Just a thought … more and more hospitals across the country are NOT investing in their own Emergency Services. They are contracting this out to third party corporate holding companies. These departments are run strictly as hard-core profit-making businesses; much like a “Urgent Care” facility.
Now, they all have agreed to put the name of a hospital administrator on the books to create the image that this is a “hospital owned and operated” business. Truth is, that your x-rays, MRIs, Scans and Scopes are not read by hospital employees. They are read by outside, independent technicians who are paid by the corporate owners. Same is true for the billing people.
I certainly hope this is Not the situation here; yet just wanted to respond to your terrible treatment.

You need one of these...

https://live.staticflickr.com/8290/7...ac1b72a7_b.jpg

Thanks, but I already have one. Except it states University of New York. And I have eight others as well.

Those others are useless against the Google one... ;)

Some people on this site think so. But I'm not a dementia specialist:1rotfl::1rotfl::1rotfl:

Knee Sprain??? ER??
 

Sorry for the poor customer service, but knee sprains are not appropriate for an ER visit. As a retired Paramedic & Instructor, I always told the public the Emergency Room is for Emergencies. Cardiovascular issues, trauma, medical emergencies, et al. Minor medical issues & injuries should report to Urgent Care or a Physician’s office.
We used to use the term “GOMER” for these minor cases showing up in ER. Get Out of My ER.
😎

I actually appreciate the OP sharing their experience here. It may or may not be colored by their own personal mood, but those here who feel compelled to call anyone who complains "entitled" and/or describes their story as "smelling fishy" is trying to keep others from sharing any future negative comments for fear of similar treatment. We're all (or at least should be) adults here and can make up our own minds about differing points of view expressed here, and I for one appreciate anyone who risks the snarky comments sure to come as possibly saving others from having the same bad experiences in the future. That goes for health care, home repair & improvements, restaurants, you name it, that's one of the reasons I come here to learn from other Villager's experiences. Take care everyone.

Many years ago my wife had a terrible bicycling accident. Serious. It required an emergency ambulance ride into TV Hospital and major reconstructive surgery that followed.

She was very well treated by everyone there. Sadly, her surgeon has moved away.