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Pasco Letters to the Editor

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 23, 2008

A Quality Hospital

The Tribune article "Picking A Hospital, It's Not Brain Surgery, But It Can Give You A Headache" (April 14) provided misleading and incomplete statistics.

Your writer hand-selected data from Medicare's online Hospital Compare database to highlight the ratings of only the region's highest-volume hospitals. This contortion of data from Medicare's online database is misleading to readers and indicates that the highest-volume hospitals in Hillsborough and Pasco counties are also the highest quality facilities.

If data were available for all 14 area hospitals, then why haven't all been included in your article, or at least the top five in each quality rating category?

Every hospital is required through industry regulations to perform at the same level of quality care, regardless of the size of the facility or volume of patients treated. Hospital Compare is designed to show how well hospitals perform at this quality paradigm.

According to Hospital Compare, the data source you credit, Pasco Regional Medical Center in Dade City received a quality score of 95 percent or higher in four of the five categories cited in your article. As you can see from the data, while Pasco Regional is a 120-bed acute care community hospital, it outperforms its larger competitors on quality in many areas.

I commend you for ranking all area hospitals in your "Hospitals Rated On Most Serious Diseases" article (May 30). I am pleased to see, once again, that Pasco Regional Medical Center took a conservative approach to health care, while simultaneously outperforming area hospitals in quality.

What is important to recognize is that more is not always better. Volume does not always translate into quality of care.

If a facility has more specialists on staff, but the outcome (quality of health care) is not any better - or, according to the data, actually lower quality - then, really, all you have is a higher cost of health care, which is inevitably passed along to the patient.

Pasco Regional Medical Center is nationally recognized for superior quality and excellence in health care. It has been ranked in the top 5 percent nationally for general surgery three consecutive years (2006, 2007, 2008) and was named one of the "Nation's 100 Top Hospitals" in 1997 and 2003.

It is the mission of Pasco Regional Medical Center to identify and exceed its patients' expectations of quality in a cost-effective, courteous manner.

NANCY McCLAIN ALFONSO

Dade City

The writer is chairman of the board of Pasco Regional Medical Center.

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