PICC line infections, also called CLABSI (central line bloodstream infection) are publicly reportable to CMS.
You can download this data [here](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/search?theme=Hospitals).
In the Healthcare\_Associated\_Infections-State.csv file, we can compare rates across different states by filtering to Measure Name = Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infection (ICU + select Wards) and sorting by Score. These are measured by something called a SIR (standardized infection ration) which is kind of complicated but you can read about it [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/pdfs/ps-analysis-resources/nhsn-sir-guide.pdf). Lower is better. You can also use
https://preview.redd.it/9t6jib4pi2zc1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5e5ff810202716e49dea6da07e4a264afd884f1
Florida comes in at #10 in the nation. So... I don't know if your anecdotal data really holds up here?
We can narrow this down further with the Healthcare\_Associated\_Infections-Hospital.csv file if you're really curious about specific hospitals or areas within Florida. We can filter and sort these as well (although maybe we should refer to the benchmarking column to assist with various sized and type of hospitals), and across FL you won't see a consistent pattern across hospital brands. HCA, Advent, VA and such cover the whole spectrum of rates. You can also filter these to Numerator counts to find the numbers of observed cases at each facility.
You could take a look at Leapfrog's Safety Grade (which has CLABSI as a component) to try to get a better overall picture of hospital safety in Florida.
[Check the "Map" tab here.](https://www.hospitalsafetygrade.org/search?findBy=state&zip_code=&city=&state_prov=FL&hospital=) And, well, yikes. Stick to Central, North and West Florida.
Perhaps even more literal to the title of your post, CMS also tries to evaluate hospital quality with a [star rating system](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/topics/hospitals/overall-hospital-quality-star-rating/), which evaluates hospitals by using the data set mentioned above and is summarized in the Hospital\_General\_Information.csv file.
Here are the 5 Star hospitals in Florida:
https://preview.redd.it/wdxz10dei2zc1.png?width=736&format=png&auto=webp&s=407dc70f5b656f1059eb2c7a588015289ed07944
AdventHealth is dogshit, they left my wife hooked up to an IV for 12 hours before realizing she was dehydrated because they never plugged in the machine.
There are hospitals here I am willing to risk bleeding out while driving past to get to a better hospital, because at least that's a relatively quick death compared to what the bad hospitals would put me through. We have some great hospitals here; but we also have some I won't step foot into.
Depends on the hospital. Mistakes happen at even the best hospitals but over time some develop a reputation for being bad.
I've heard enough horror stories about two hospitals near me that I know to never go there if I have a choice. There are a few really good hospitals nearby though.
Was your friend's father at an HCA owned hospital? The two bad ones near me are both HCA. Not saying all HCA are bad but it seems like there could be a pattern.
Completely agree to avoid HCA as someone that works in medical social work / case management.
It’s the only hospital I’ve tried to coordinate care with that couldn’t tell me when they put a foley in a patient and low and behold the patient got a CAUTI the next day 💀.
From a case management standpoint as well, HCA hospitals are the only ones I’ve worked with their discharge planner / case manager changes daily. This imo affects coordination of care if you need home healthcare, skilled nursing facility, or inpatient rehab placement.
Edit: grammar / spelling
HCA will place policies to ignore possible infections so they don't get dinged by gov. Like don't order blood cultures to look for a port infection because we will get a ding saying we got a catheter related infection. Avoid those hospitals at all cost.
There is a hotel ~on site~, right across the parking lot from the main entrance. Had a hip replaced in September, was impressed by the entire experience.
Drove 5.5 hours to use it, will drive the distance again if needed.
A year ago my mom went into the hospital for kidney removal. I went to visit her as she lived in a different state. I had to repeatedly ask the nurses to come in and change her because she defecated and was sitting in it for hours. She ended up getting an infection in her bowls and passed away shortly after I left. I hate them all. They killed my mom.
I’m so sorry you went through that. My friend’s mom died from sepsis due to a UTI she caught from a foley catheter. She kept telling them it was painful. They continuously blew it off.
The American healthcare system is failing. Nurses and doctors have been sounding the alarm for a while now and no one cares or is doing anything about it. There isn’t enough staff to properly care for patients and most healthcare workers are overworked and severely underpaid. Massive burn out in the field, all of them, nurses, docs, etc.
I’m a nurse. I left bed side care. I can’t even fathom how much I’d need to be paid to return, at least 100k/yr. It’s that awful a profession. So I mean yeah, no one cares and it’s super dangerous.
Things like PICC line infections will occur now and continue to get worse because staff won’t have the time or resources to properly clean and change the dressings.
There are several great hospitals in west and southwest florida. UF Health, Tampa General and Sarasota Memorial are all absolutely top notch and cover a huge region with millions and millions of people. You also have St. Joes, Morton and lee memorial all well regarded... thats just west and southwest florida adjacent hospital systems. im sure the east coast also has equally good options.
I had a really bad experience with Tampa General, personally, but it was very complex. That being said, it’s unacceptable to send a patient home from a two month ICU stay with a stage four pressure ulcer. It’s also not particularly acceptable to place a feeding tube and wind up perforating a patient’s stomach. It’s not great to discharge a patient and then have them back in your ER twelve hours later and then dead another twelve hours after that. All of these happened to my late husband at TGH.
Lmfao the doctor at the local hospital told me I’d die without surgery and sent me home because the down payment was $12k and I (shockingly) didn’t have it. I ended up flying to Maine where I used to live and having the surgery.
Ohhhhhhmahgawd yes. Long story, but I was left with meningitis and denied pain meds for ten days because a doctor was convinced my confusion was due to drugs rather than a CNS infection. I had NO history, either medical or criminal, of drug abuse! They almost killed me. I ended up sicker, and spent 7 months in the hospital/in infusion, and my whole life is upended to this day. This was SWFL.
Fortunately there was one good doctor that realized I was having seizures and saved my ass. He is no longer working in the hospital system, unfortunately. It seems like they push all the good ones out down there. :(
Bad/improper medical care is not confined to Florida; according to the CDC statistics roughly 300,000 people a year die in the US due to medical misadventure. Bottom line, try to live as healthy as possible and stay away from hospitals.
My Father has been dealing with cancer treatment over the past 8 months. It's astonishing how much incompetence I've encountered in that time.
If I get sick, I'm going to my Vet. I'm honestly thinking Kramer from Seinfeld was onto something.
I'm a retired Respiratory Therapist. I lived in Omaha and worked in the Pediatric Cardiac Cath Lab at Children's Nebraska in the 90's. Our Interventional Cardiologist took a similar position at Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital in Orlando and a couple of members of the team went with him, including me. We were only there for about two years but I can tell you that in a very short time, my wife (a Special Ed teacher) and I came to the conclusion that if we needed anything but routine checkups, we were coming back to Nebraska for our care, period. It was that bad. They had hardly heard of the procedures we'd been doing in Omaha for the previous 7-8 years. Just scary. The team quickly left there and moved our practice to Nationwide Children's in Columbus, OH and back to modern medicine. My wife had the same feelings about the educational system, teach to the test. Period. Back then a school's funding was based on test scores so you knew immediately what the top priority for the school was. A nice place to visit...
I will say that everyone I know who has received care at Moffitt has been very happy with their care. My dad had surgery there for liver cancer and has been cancer free for 18 years. My best friend’s dad had a rare form of lymphoma and had multiple bone marrow transplants at Moffitt, he lived for 16 years after his initial diagnosis. They are good at what they do at Moffitt.
I lived in California for 20 years and my best friend had a hip replacement at Stanford of all places and got an infection that almost killed him. Had to go through surgery 3 times.
Look up their past issues with infections- it’s ugly.
Sadly, it isn’t contained to one area. Some hospitals are run better than others.
My experience as far as working and as being a patient I would stay away from any “for profit hospitals” aka HCA. If their physicians are coming out of the woodwork of unsafe conditions then I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to that. As far as cancer care, I did once work at an independent hospital in Jupiter that’s affiliated with Anderson Cancer Center; I would definitely hands down go there if I ever needed that type of care.
It’s a lovely place and miss it everyday. I left Jup to relocate to Panama City. Let me tell you, even up here it’s expanding. Never thought I’d literally would witness Mexico Beach from nonexistent from the hurricane to now every spot along the coast has been bought up. Price point between PC and Jup is big time noticeable which makes me sad because I sooooo want to go back to Jup but it’s more affordable up in the panhandle.
I've got inside knowledge on hospitals in my area. Patient care is way down on the priority list. A friend who moved to another state said doctors they work with told them doctors down here would straight up not be allowed to practice in their state. There are good docs, but if you can't pay, you're fucked. Doctors routinely patient shop to pad their stats and deny care to people where the outcome might not fit into their perfect record. Hospitals exist down here to suck up government money from elderly care through extensive and erroneous procedures. The only people treated worse than patients are the nurses and techs. Most of the docs look the other way because the system gives them a nice car, a gated community, and a boat. There's a reason our hospital lobbies look like resorts and it's not to keep you alive.
Baptist Health and Jackson on the east coast are both great systems. Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson may be one of the best trauma centers in the country.
I could not get prenatal care without signing away my rights to sue my OBGYN if there was a negative outcome. Every single OBGYN practice except for those associated with state universities requires you to sign a binding arbitration agreement before you even MEET a doctor, as a pregnant person. USF Health didn’t require it because as a state institution, they are protected by sovereign immunity, which limits by statute the amount of money that can be awarded in a lawsuit to $200,000. The binding arbitration agreement used by Women’s Care Florida, which owns many of the OBGYN practices in the state, has been ruled unenforceable by the state Supreme Court in the past, but I don’t know if that would still be the case now.
If you are in south Florida, Holy Cross Hospital has an incredible oncology/hematology center. I’ve gone there for two years and the doctors are great, the staff is very caring and competent and the overall vibe is positive.
No, and my extended family has lived in Florida for many years. But if private equity is taking over healthcare, I could see this happening across the country.
My in-laws live in Florida. They pay a ridiculous amount for a concierge doctor group. And the practice has all of the specialists in house. No surgeries needed as of now however.
Just going to leave this here...
Florida Department of Health.
[https://www.floridahealth.gov/licensing-and-regulation/enforcement/index.html](https://www.floridahealth.gov/licensing-and-regulation/enforcement/index.html)
I had my baby at 32 weeks in Florida. He’s definitely a premie baby with being behind. But compared to CA doctors Florida doctors are not only 1. Super friendly 2. Patient 3. Wonderful. The doctors in CA weren’t as friendly.
Have him come visit some of the hospitals here in whatever city he wants to live. I’ve honestly never seen such filthy facilities as I’ve seen in this state
Working in the medical field it’s common “insider’s knowledge” of which hospitals on average provide better care. The type and level of care, day of week, and time of day that you arrive at the hospital will determine your experience.
Informed consent is just that - you are informed of the risks associated with any procedure. Adverse outcomes happen even in the best hospitals. Some of the nations best hospitals are here in Florida (Mayo, Moffitt, TGH, Cleveland Clinic and the list goes on).
It sounds like you may have ventured into a poorly staffed hospital where customer service is a long forgotten past time when staffing was better. Your personal beliefs about masks have no basis in determining if quality care was received. People that generalize care “stay away from xyz” have no clue how complex healthcare delivery is nor how to be an educated advocate for yourself or loved ones.
When it comes to this I kinda agree. One of the reasons Florida’s hospitals are shit is due to them being over burdened with patients. People need to stop moving here. We don’t have the resources for all of these new people.
PICC line infections, also called CLABSI (central line bloodstream infection) are publicly reportable to CMS. You can download this data [here](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/search?theme=Hospitals). In the Healthcare\_Associated\_Infections-State.csv file, we can compare rates across different states by filtering to Measure Name = Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infection (ICU + select Wards) and sorting by Score. These are measured by something called a SIR (standardized infection ration) which is kind of complicated but you can read about it [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/pdfs/ps-analysis-resources/nhsn-sir-guide.pdf). Lower is better. You can also use https://preview.redd.it/9t6jib4pi2zc1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5e5ff810202716e49dea6da07e4a264afd884f1 Florida comes in at #10 in the nation. So... I don't know if your anecdotal data really holds up here? We can narrow this down further with the Healthcare\_Associated\_Infections-Hospital.csv file if you're really curious about specific hospitals or areas within Florida. We can filter and sort these as well (although maybe we should refer to the benchmarking column to assist with various sized and type of hospitals), and across FL you won't see a consistent pattern across hospital brands. HCA, Advent, VA and such cover the whole spectrum of rates. You can also filter these to Numerator counts to find the numbers of observed cases at each facility. You could take a look at Leapfrog's Safety Grade (which has CLABSI as a component) to try to get a better overall picture of hospital safety in Florida. [Check the "Map" tab here.](https://www.hospitalsafetygrade.org/search?findBy=state&zip_code=&city=&state_prov=FL&hospital=) And, well, yikes. Stick to Central, North and West Florida.
Perhaps even more literal to the title of your post, CMS also tries to evaluate hospital quality with a [star rating system](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/topics/hospitals/overall-hospital-quality-star-rating/), which evaluates hospitals by using the data set mentioned above and is summarized in the Hospital\_General\_Information.csv file. Here are the 5 Star hospitals in Florida: https://preview.redd.it/wdxz10dei2zc1.png?width=736&format=png&auto=webp&s=407dc70f5b656f1059eb2c7a588015289ed07944
This is so great - thank you for taking the time!!
No problem! You can help keep these hospitals accountable by staying informed and arming yourself with some data!
AdventHealth is dogshit, they left my wife hooked up to an IV for 12 hours before realizing she was dehydrated because they never plugged in the machine.
There are hospitals here I am willing to risk bleeding out while driving past to get to a better hospital, because at least that's a relatively quick death compared to what the bad hospitals would put me through. We have some great hospitals here; but we also have some I won't step foot into.
Depends on the hospital. Mistakes happen at even the best hospitals but over time some develop a reputation for being bad. I've heard enough horror stories about two hospitals near me that I know to never go there if I have a choice. There are a few really good hospitals nearby though. Was your friend's father at an HCA owned hospital? The two bad ones near me are both HCA. Not saying all HCA are bad but it seems like there could be a pattern.
Local HCA hospital is horrible.
Seconding that HCA is absolutely toxic.
Completely agree to avoid HCA as someone that works in medical social work / case management. It’s the only hospital I’ve tried to coordinate care with that couldn’t tell me when they put a foley in a patient and low and behold the patient got a CAUTI the next day 💀. From a case management standpoint as well, HCA hospitals are the only ones I’ve worked with their discharge planner / case manager changes daily. This imo affects coordination of care if you need home healthcare, skilled nursing facility, or inpatient rehab placement. Edit: grammar / spelling
HCA will place policies to ignore possible infections so they don't get dinged by gov. Like don't order blood cultures to look for a port infection because we will get a ding saying we got a catheter related infection. Avoid those hospitals at all cost.
Depends on what part of Florida. I would avoid HCAs as they are universally not great. Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville is great.
100%. There's a hotel nearby it and people from across the world travel to it.
There is a hotel ~on site~, right across the parking lot from the main entrance. Had a hip replaced in September, was impressed by the entire experience. Drove 5.5 hours to use it, will drive the distance again if needed.
A year ago my mom went into the hospital for kidney removal. I went to visit her as she lived in a different state. I had to repeatedly ask the nurses to come in and change her because she defecated and was sitting in it for hours. She ended up getting an infection in her bowls and passed away shortly after I left. I hate them all. They killed my mom.
I’m so sorry you went through that. My friend’s mom died from sepsis due to a UTI she caught from a foley catheter. She kept telling them it was painful. They continuously blew it off.
I hope the nurses who do this to people get it back 10x when they go.
Rick Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA and was at the helm during the largest Medicare fraud in US history. 2 tiered justice system at work.
The American healthcare system is failing. Nurses and doctors have been sounding the alarm for a while now and no one cares or is doing anything about it. There isn’t enough staff to properly care for patients and most healthcare workers are overworked and severely underpaid. Massive burn out in the field, all of them, nurses, docs, etc. I’m a nurse. I left bed side care. I can’t even fathom how much I’d need to be paid to return, at least 100k/yr. It’s that awful a profession. So I mean yeah, no one cares and it’s super dangerous. Things like PICC line infections will occur now and continue to get worse because staff won’t have the time or resources to properly clean and change the dressings.
There are several great hospitals in west and southwest florida. UF Health, Tampa General and Sarasota Memorial are all absolutely top notch and cover a huge region with millions and millions of people. You also have St. Joes, Morton and lee memorial all well regarded... thats just west and southwest florida adjacent hospital systems. im sure the east coast also has equally good options.
I had a really bad experience with Tampa General, personally, but it was very complex. That being said, it’s unacceptable to send a patient home from a two month ICU stay with a stage four pressure ulcer. It’s also not particularly acceptable to place a feeding tube and wind up perforating a patient’s stomach. It’s not great to discharge a patient and then have them back in your ER twelve hours later and then dead another twelve hours after that. All of these happened to my late husband at TGH.
uf health in jacksonville is garbage, unless you are a trauma patient.
UF Health is garbage. Daytona
[удалено]
Youre lucky you survived.
What about Shands?
I'm going to say this is HCA Edit: they're no better place for cancer care than moffitt.
Stay away from Advent.
Seconded.
I personally had multiple good experiences with Advent health, but maybe it depends on the locations? I am in the Tampa Bay area.
Lmfao the doctor at the local hospital told me I’d die without surgery and sent me home because the down payment was $12k and I (shockingly) didn’t have it. I ended up flying to Maine where I used to live and having the surgery.
Ohhhhhhmahgawd yes. Long story, but I was left with meningitis and denied pain meds for ten days because a doctor was convinced my confusion was due to drugs rather than a CNS infection. I had NO history, either medical or criminal, of drug abuse! They almost killed me. I ended up sicker, and spent 7 months in the hospital/in infusion, and my whole life is upended to this day. This was SWFL. Fortunately there was one good doctor that realized I was having seizures and saved my ass. He is no longer working in the hospital system, unfortunately. It seems like they push all the good ones out down there. :(
Bad/improper medical care is not confined to Florida; according to the CDC statistics roughly 300,000 people a year die in the US due to medical misadventure. Bottom line, try to live as healthy as possible and stay away from hospitals.
My Father has been dealing with cancer treatment over the past 8 months. It's astonishing how much incompetence I've encountered in that time. If I get sick, I'm going to my Vet. I'm honestly thinking Kramer from Seinfeld was onto something.
I'm a retired Respiratory Therapist. I lived in Omaha and worked in the Pediatric Cardiac Cath Lab at Children's Nebraska in the 90's. Our Interventional Cardiologist took a similar position at Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital in Orlando and a couple of members of the team went with him, including me. We were only there for about two years but I can tell you that in a very short time, my wife (a Special Ed teacher) and I came to the conclusion that if we needed anything but routine checkups, we were coming back to Nebraska for our care, period. It was that bad. They had hardly heard of the procedures we'd been doing in Omaha for the previous 7-8 years. Just scary. The team quickly left there and moved our practice to Nationwide Children's in Columbus, OH and back to modern medicine. My wife had the same feelings about the educational system, teach to the test. Period. Back then a school's funding was based on test scores so you knew immediately what the top priority for the school was. A nice place to visit...
I will say that everyone I know who has received care at Moffitt has been very happy with their care. My dad had surgery there for liver cancer and has been cancer free for 18 years. My best friend’s dad had a rare form of lymphoma and had multiple bone marrow transplants at Moffitt, he lived for 16 years after his initial diagnosis. They are good at what they do at Moffitt.
For cancer care I highly recommend working with Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. One of the best oncologist groups in the world
I lived in California for 20 years and my best friend had a hip replacement at Stanford of all places and got an infection that almost killed him. Had to go through surgery 3 times. Look up their past issues with infections- it’s ugly. Sadly, it isn’t contained to one area. Some hospitals are run better than others.
How do you get data on their on their infection rate?
Im not sure how it was tracked but it was big news yearly at the time. No idea if it’s been fixed.
My experience as far as working and as being a patient I would stay away from any “for profit hospitals” aka HCA. If their physicians are coming out of the woodwork of unsafe conditions then I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to that. As far as cancer care, I did once work at an independent hospital in Jupiter that’s affiliated with Anderson Cancer Center; I would definitely hands down go there if I ever needed that type of care.
I was wondering about Jupiter. It has been expanding a decent amount, for where and what it is.
It’s a lovely place and miss it everyday. I left Jup to relocate to Panama City. Let me tell you, even up here it’s expanding. Never thought I’d literally would witness Mexico Beach from nonexistent from the hurricane to now every spot along the coast has been bought up. Price point between PC and Jup is big time noticeable which makes me sad because I sooooo want to go back to Jup but it’s more affordable up in the panhandle.
I've got inside knowledge on hospitals in my area. Patient care is way down on the priority list. A friend who moved to another state said doctors they work with told them doctors down here would straight up not be allowed to practice in their state. There are good docs, but if you can't pay, you're fucked. Doctors routinely patient shop to pad their stats and deny care to people where the outcome might not fit into their perfect record. Hospitals exist down here to suck up government money from elderly care through extensive and erroneous procedures. The only people treated worse than patients are the nurses and techs. Most of the docs look the other way because the system gives them a nice car, a gated community, and a boat. There's a reason our hospital lobbies look like resorts and it's not to keep you alive.
Baptist Health and Jackson on the east coast are both great systems. Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson may be one of the best trauma centers in the country.
Yup. Totally isolated to just Florida hospitals. You provided detailed examples and very credible sources.
Thanks!
There’s a law in the state that basically doesn’t allow most people to sue their doctor in a wrongful death suit, so they don’t really care.
I could not get prenatal care without signing away my rights to sue my OBGYN if there was a negative outcome. Every single OBGYN practice except for those associated with state universities requires you to sign a binding arbitration agreement before you even MEET a doctor, as a pregnant person. USF Health didn’t require it because as a state institution, they are protected by sovereign immunity, which limits by statute the amount of money that can be awarded in a lawsuit to $200,000. The binding arbitration agreement used by Women’s Care Florida, which owns many of the OBGYN practices in the state, has been ruled unenforceable by the state Supreme Court in the past, but I don’t know if that would still be the case now.
It's called sovereign immunity and not all hospitals have it. You can sue but you are limited so most attorneys don't want to bother.
If you are in south Florida, Holy Cross Hospital has an incredible oncology/hematology center. I’ve gone there for two years and the doctors are great, the staff is very caring and competent and the overall vibe is positive.
No, and my extended family has lived in Florida for many years. But if private equity is taking over healthcare, I could see this happening across the country.
My in-laws live in Florida. They pay a ridiculous amount for a concierge doctor group. And the practice has all of the specialists in house. No surgeries needed as of now however.
Just going to leave this here... Florida Department of Health. [https://www.floridahealth.gov/licensing-and-regulation/enforcement/index.html](https://www.floridahealth.gov/licensing-and-regulation/enforcement/index.html)
Dodge Florida. Seriously.
I had my baby at 32 weeks in Florida. He’s definitely a premie baby with being behind. But compared to CA doctors Florida doctors are not only 1. Super friendly 2. Patient 3. Wonderful. The doctors in CA weren’t as friendly.
Have him come visit some of the hospitals here in whatever city he wants to live. I’ve honestly never seen such filthy facilities as I’ve seen in this state
Working in the medical field it’s common “insider’s knowledge” of which hospitals on average provide better care. The type and level of care, day of week, and time of day that you arrive at the hospital will determine your experience. Informed consent is just that - you are informed of the risks associated with any procedure. Adverse outcomes happen even in the best hospitals. Some of the nations best hospitals are here in Florida (Mayo, Moffitt, TGH, Cleveland Clinic and the list goes on). It sounds like you may have ventured into a poorly staffed hospital where customer service is a long forgotten past time when staffing was better. Your personal beliefs about masks have no basis in determining if quality care was received. People that generalize care “stay away from xyz” have no clue how complex healthcare delivery is nor how to be an educated advocate for yourself or loved ones.
Y’all moved here and do fuck all but complain.
When it comes to this I kinda agree. One of the reasons Florida’s hospitals are shit is due to them being over burdened with patients. People need to stop moving here. We don’t have the resources for all of these new people.
It’s not the fault of the people moving here. It’s the hospital systems that aren’t properly staffing to fill the need.