What hospital are patients most satisfied with in the Ottawa area? The Ottawa Hospital.
Where can a patient get the fastest emergency room care for minor conditions? Queensway Carleton Hospital.
What is the C. difficile infection rate at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario? In January, the latest numbers available, the rate was 0.42 per 1,000 patient days. The provincial average was 0.36 for C.
difficile, a potentially deadly bacterium that causes diarrhea.
A new website comes online today with a promise to minimize bureaucratic jargon and offer health consumers a user-friendly way to find out information about their local hospitals.
The site, myhospitalcare.ca, has been established by the Ontario Hospital Association, a group representing the 155 hospital corporations in Ontario.
It uses 39 health indicators, such as C. difficile infection rates and hospital death rates, to inform the public about their hospital.
The OHA has published Hospital Report, a scorecard on hospital performance, since 1998, but it is meant to be a tool for hospital administrators. Critics complained the public found the report difficult to understand.
The myhospitalcare.ca website blends data from a variety of sources, such as the Ontario health ministry and the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and then presents the indicators experts believe are of the greatest interest to the public.
“We are trying to educate and meet the public’s need around the hunger for information,” said Tom Closson, OHA president. “We thought we would try and create a website we could promote, give it a name that is catchy and pick indicators the public could be interested in.”
The indicators range from family perception of care for their loved ones, to the percentage of patients who were physically restrained during a typical 90-day period, and, overall emergency department care.
