Are You Most Safe At A Highly Ranked Hospital?
John Smith | January 15, 2011Whenever you head into the entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, you simply can’t miss all the signs reminding you that Hopkins is ranked number 1 hospital in the United states by U.S. News & World Report. Hopkins is justifiably very pleased of achieving that top place year after year, but does it mean anything at all for patient safety and quality of care?
A recent research project in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that for the 50 top-ranked hospitals, there is very little relationship between their U.S. News rank and any objective measurements of quality of care. But when the authors ran the figures, they determined the hospital’s subjective recognition among medical professionals made up 90 to 100 percent of the hospital’s overall U.S. News ranking. Quite simply, the word of mouth recognition of the hospital among medical professionals — not among patients — counts for a massive amount of the news magazine’s popular ratings system.
Finding the right hospital is not very easy. But there are some basic guidelines. Concentrate on the brand-name hospitals like Hopkins only if you have an exotic issue that very few medical professionals have ever seen.
In its 20 years of rating hospitals, U.S. News has never questioned a single patient what they think; its ratings of a hospital’s reputation in a particular specialty is based solely on what doctors in that specialty believe. But now Medicare has started requiring hospitals to have patients fill out a standardized survey when they leave the hospital, and the questions concentrate on a lot of problems that people care about and have a massive effect on the quality and safety of their care, such as:
Did the medical doctors and nurses always communicate well? Was the bathroom always clean? Was your pain always well-controlled? Was the area around your room always quiet at night?
Note that little word “always.” These are things patients have a right to expect – always.
You are going to find that many community hospitals do a superior job than the mega-hospitals of taking care of patients in the ways that patients recognize.
Our birth injury lawyers are committed to gaining the results to help our birth injury victims rebuild shattered lives after tragic events.














Recent Comments