Year of Living Dangerously...PO Day 82

It's not the romantically thrilling struggle by Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver in the 1982 movie. It's not the moral challenge  faced weekly on the environmental showtime TV series of 2014. It is making the  right choices, doing the prudent thing, asking the probing questions which increase your chances of surviving your hospital surgical experience that can extend months before and months after your operation. It's fairly common for the surgical patient to be told "full recovery" is about one year. What can you do to increase your chances of surviving?

It starts with choosing the right hospital which is usually based on proximity. It doesn't occur to many of us to look outside our own community for a better facility. We've built a relationship with a physician whose surgical privileges are limited to one or two nearby hospitals. Commuting to a larger city, even one not too distant, would add tremendously to the burden of family and care giver. But what do we really know about our hospital of choice?Consumer Reports in a September 2013 article ranked American surgical hospitals like they do TVs and refrigerators. The basic score was determined by the percentage of the hospital's Medicare patients who died in the hospital or who stayed longer than expected following surgery. The scores were adjusted for age, general health and other extenuating factors. A score of 5 was the highest, 1 was the lowest.

I was surprised to learn teaching hospitals scored higher on procedures like angioplasty and carotid artery operations but they were no better than other hospitals for hip, knee, and back operations. Just because a hospital (St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn, NY, for example) scored well in one category, '5' in angioplasty, it did not alter the fact they scored poorly in another, carotid artery surgery got a '1".

There can be quite a difference between hospitals only a few miles apart. The Greater Baltimore  Medical Center scored high, but nearby Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center scored low. Both urban and rural facilities can surprise you. Urban hospitals often did well in spite of a patient population that is typically poorer and sicker. And rural hospitals did better, on average, than other hospitals. Sadly, big name hospitals often did not live up to their reputations.

Hospitals that are part of the same healthcare system can have quite disparate total scores. Florida Hospital  DeLand was rated 4, Florida Hospital Flagler scored a 3, while Florida Hospital St Augustine and Florida Hospital Orlando received the lowest rating, 1.

Of approximately 140 hospitals in Florida, only eight received the highest score, "5". Ten rated "4".
The majority, seventy-six were judged as a "3". Twenty-two were judged next to the worst at "2" and twenty-three scored at the bottom, "1".

If you are a subscriber to Consumer Reports you can learn more about your community hospital on line. Knowing more about your hospital might just take some of the danger out of your surgical experience and make you a survivor.





Archive timeline: 2014: May and June - preparing for surgery, July - surgery and post op problems, August - recovery and physical therapy, September....