A friend shared a link to Consumer Reports’ ranking of Honolulu hospitals.
Castle Medical Center gets top marks in their ranking, followed relatively closely by Straub and Queen’s. Kuakini, the smallest of the four facilities, lags well behind the others.
According to the Consumer Reports data, Queen’s Medical Center is by far the largest hospital. It has three times the rooms as Castle, and four times as many as Straub.
The rankings are based on assessments in certain areas, which are detailed here.
How do these data assist you?
Here’s Consumer Reports’ response.
They can help you compare hospitals in your area so you can choose the one that’s best for you. Even if you don’t have a choice of hospitals, our ratings can alert you to particular concerns so you can take steps to prevent problems no matter which hospital you go to. For example, if a hospital scores low in communicating with patients about what to do when they’re discharged, you should ask about discharge planning at the hospital you chose and make sure you know what to do when you leave.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Why didn’t they rate Moanalua (Kaiser)? It’s shown in their survey details but marked ‘NA’.
Don’t understand what Kaiser’s “N/A” means.
CR states in its explanation of its rating:
“Our ratings have information on over 4,000 hospitals. If a hospital you’re looking for isn’t listed, it could be for several reasons. Some report data under a parent organization, so they might not show up as individual facilities. ”
My guess would be that Kaiser is one of those hospitals that is reporting data under a parent organization.
“If a hospital you’re looking for isn’t listed, …”
Ah, but it *is* listed. It just has “NA” instead of a rating. Does CR equate “not listing” as being the same as listing and then giving a value of “NA”?
Kaiser gets a score of N/A, but they didn’t rank well on some of the individual parameters.
I had a problem with Kaiser hospital years ago, and in my futile quest for resolution I learned that when KP ranks poorly, they simply stop reporting the relevant statistics whenever they can get away with it. CR’s data seems to have come from public sources, but much of the time reporting by the hospital is voluntary, and info on Kaiser must be lacking or it seems like it would have been scored.
Too many years have passed for me to direct anyone to proof that Kaiser does this intentionally to avoid poor rankings, but my word is at least as good as any PR-Gobbledygook Kaiser would be likely to spew in response to inquiries on the matter.
Out of curiosity, I checked the ratings fort he hospitals in California and Texas.
The three hospitals in California with the highest safety rating received a score of 69.
The highest rated hospital in Texas is Covenant Hospital-Levelland, located in Levelland, a town of about 14,000 people 30 miles west of Lubbock. It’s rating is 72, but it’s important to note that it was rated on only two of the six criteria because there was not enough data generated to formulate ratings for the other criteria. Briefly scanning the scores for Texas hospitals, I observed that many of the hospitals with high ratings are located in small towns and had received their high rating based on only a few of the criteria. (Perhaps the key to receiving an overall good CR rating it to be too small to generate sufficient data for most of the criteria.)
If you click on the name of a specific hospital that you are curious about, you can access a great deal more information. That is an excellent feature of the CR report.