Consumer Reports recently conducted a study on hospitals around the country that sought to determine which were the safest in terms of surgical outcomes and which fared the poorest. The results paint a picture of some of the track records of hospitals in California.
Coming in with a score of 25 out of 100, the Kern County-based Delano Regional Medical Center ranked worse than any other hospitals. While a new report doesn’t delve into what that score actually means for that hospital, it does look at the record of the Whittier-based PIH Health (Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital), which was right on Delano’s heels with a score of 26. From April through December of 2011, 2,228 procedures took place at PIH. Of those, 31 patients developed some type of an infection at the site of the surgery.
Of course, infections weren’t the only thing that researchers took into account when compiling the data. When analyzing death rates and lengthier than estimated hospitalization rates of Medicaid patients, they considered five types of surgery: back, hip, knee, carotid artery, and angioplasty operations.
Although hospitals nationwide were all over the board in terms of rankings, as a whole, the study found that around three out of ten patients in these become infected, sustain a stroke, have a heart attack, or go through some other complication derived from surgery.
Some hospitals, such as Cedars-Sinai, refuted these findings.