Originally published August 4 2005
Medical care quality varies depending on where you live
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine show the quality of medical care patients receive likely varies depending on geographic location, and, in general, hospitals in the North and Midwest offered better care than those in the South and West; studies also show many hospitals across the country are failing to properly administer some of the simplest medical treatments.
Even within regions, the quality of care is inconsistent, the studies show.
Among the 40 most populous regions, for example, Washington area hospitals ranked 10th in treating a common condition in which the heart slowly fails but only 28th in caring for victims of sudden heart attacks and 29th in dealing with pneumonia.
"Our study reinforces that that's really not happening."
There are also significant differences in quality between categories of hospitals: Nonprofit hospitals tend to deliver higher-quality care than for-profit ones, and those affiliated with medical schools score better than those that are not, the researchers found.
There is also wide variation within hospitals, meaning patients have no guarantee they are going to get the best care by choosing, for example, big centers associated with well-known medical schools, Jha's analysis concluded.
"There is this notion that you can pick out something that will tell you, 'This is a very good hospital,' " Jha said.
Hospitals affiliated with medical schools, for example, tend to deliver better care to patients with heart attacks or heart failure but score more poorly when it comes to caring for those with pneumonia, the analysis found.
These are the easy things," said Lucian Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health, a medical quality expert who was not involved in the studies.
Many studies have examined the quality of care in hospitals, but most have been limited to individual institutions or geographic regions or specific types of hospitals or patients, such as Medicare recipients or veterans.
The analyses are the first to use nationwide data collected by two new efforts to improve hospital quality.
In the first, Jerod M. Loeb and his colleagues at the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations analyzed data the group began soliciting in 2002 from every hospital it accredits.
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