We’ve come a long way in women’s health care in the past decade. These days, women have a much better chance of survival when it comes to heart conditions than they did in the past. Unfortunately, how well women fare when it comes to heart disease and related conditions seems to have a lot to do with the doctor and hospital responsible for treating them.
For instance, women who go into hospitals for treatment of heart disease can have a 40% greater chance of survival if they go to a hospital that is rated as having the “best- performing” women’s heart staff, as opposed to facilities with the poorest history of treatments. Going under for bypass surgery? If you choose a better hospital, then you can improve your survival chances by 50%. That’s quite a difference!
Now comes the tricky part. How do you know which hospital is rated as “best performing” and which is rated as “poorest performing?” Well, if you don’t have to go into the hospital for a few weeks, do a bit of sleuthing to figure out where you can go. Many major cities have as many as seven or more hospitals to choose from.
A new web site has compiled information on 2,100 hospitals across the United States. To find out which hospital rates best for your particular procedure, simply visit the web site www.HealthGrades.com.
You can do a free search on your hospital’s rating. Just click your state and choose your procedure. Then find your area and the top-rated hospital will be the first in the list. For instance, in the Orlando region of Florida, the top rated hospital for coronary bypass operations is Central Florida Regional Hospital.
You can do this search for a number of operations and all of the states. Once you find the top-rated hospital in your area, if this is where you choose to go, make sure you find out the resident surgeon’s statistics. What his/her post- surgical infection rate is like, what his/her survival rates are like, and all the other info that can help you determine if you’re in good hands.
If you have time to do this kind of research, you might find that the rate of care you receive could double. When talking about your health and rate of survival that’s extremely important.
Hopefully, by placing these statistics on the Internet, hospitals will work harder to start performing at a top rate. If this were to happen then as many as 30,500 women with heart disease could be saved in the United States each year.