Hospitals
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Find a good hospital
Did you know that not all hospitals give the same quality of care? One resource you can use when choosing a hospital is Consumer Reports Patient Ratings. They're based on survey responses from more than 1 million patients, and published research suggests that higher patient ratings can mean higher quality of care.
When you're choosing a hospital, to help guide your choice, find out what patients had to say about their hospital experiences in the following areas:
- How well doctors and nurses communicated
- Whether pain was well-controlled
- How often they received help when needed
- Cleanliness and quietness of rooms
- Explanation about new medications
- Instructions about what to look out for when discharged
- Whether the patient would recommend the hospital to family and friends
- The patient's overall rating of his or her experience.
You can use our Ratings as indicators of what your experience is likely to be like. Patients who are already hospitalized (and their family members) can learn about problems other patients may have encountered so that they're better prepared to deal with them if need be. For example, if a hospital is rated low for communication with doctors or for dispensing helpful discharge instructions, then patients or family members can make an effort to ask more probing questions to get the information they need in terms they can understand.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere have found an association between higher patient satisfaction and higher quality of clinical care for patients hospitalized for heart attack, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and prevention of complications from surgery. One reason may be that the hospitals for which patients reported better experiences tended to have the highest ratio of full-time nurses to patients, according to the study, published in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Other research has also linked higher nurse-staffing levels with greater patient satisfaction scores--and with lower complication and mortality rates. In addition, some evidence suggests that attentive nurses, communicative physicians, adequate pain management, and well-planned hospital discharges all may be related to improved health outcomes.
In contrast, less favorable patient Ratings are associated with more aggressive care--longer hospitalizations under the care of multiple specialists--leading to less-coordinated care and possibly worse patient outcomes. Low patient Ratings are also associated with poorer technical quality measures for the management of heart attack, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia, reports a team of investigators led by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care in Lebanon, N.H. Poorly coordinated care, they conclude, may be the culprit that links less-favorable patient experiences with lower quality and more aggressive care.
These new Ratings also integrate our chronic care Ratings, which compare hospitals based on how aggressively or conservatively they treat serious chronic medical conditions such as heart failure or chronic lung disease. See our frequently asked questions for more details about our Patient Ratings and for other factors to consider when choosing a hospital.
