| August 20th, 2008 | All Hospitals Are Not Created Equal |
Hi! Are you a new or recent visitor to my blog? 
All hospitals are not created equal for every medical emergency. Whether the emergency is a stroke, a high-risk birth, or a heart attack, you should know that it is worth doing whatever it takes to get to the right place. So how can you go about learning which hospital is right for your medical needs? Take some time to research hospitals on the Internet Healthgrades.com ranks hospitals by specialty, as does The Leapfrog Group. You can discover which is the best place to have knee surgery in Topeka, Kansas, or the best place to have a baby in Washington, DC. JointCommission.org lists hospitals that have certification for various medical specialties. Hospitalcompare.hhs.gov has detailed information about procedures performed at different hospitals. Be sure to ask the right questions. If you are not able to locate the information you are seeking on the Internet, you will need to call the hospital’s quality office. Generally, the hospitals which perform a high number of a given procedure such as heart bypass surgery, hip replacement, usually have the best results. What if there is an emergency? This may sound unusual, but it can be quite possible to anticipate many emergencies. Be sure to think about what emergencies are highly likely to occur in your family. Perhaps your spouse has an existing heart condition, or perhaps you have a high-risk pregnancy and are at risk of having a premature baby. What you need to do first, is find out where an ambulance would take you if you dialed 911. If you decide that you want to go elsewhere, you may be out of luck. Generally you cannot persuade an ambulance driver to go to a stroke center if you’ve had a stroke, or to go to a children’s hospital if your child is injured. But you can take it upon yourself to be an informed consumer and take time to check with the emergency service providers in your area to find which hospital you’d be taken to and see whether you’d be able to negotiate a different destination. Back in October of 2007, my husband was having a major heart attack and the ambulance driver did ask him whether he wanted to go to Cooperstown or to Cobleskill. Cooperstown was farther away, about 45 minutes, but is well known for its cardiac care, so my husband told the driver to take him there. This will not always be the case whereby you are asked where you want to be taken, that is why it is important that you research your options to see about the options for a different destination should the situation warrant that. Posted in Health | No Comments »
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| August 19th, 2008 | Arte y Pico Award |
I have received a really nice Blog Award! Wow, Keep ‘em coming! For this one, I want to thank Monika! The rules for passing this honor on: The award goes to the following blogs which I regularly visit and thought that their blogs rocks: 1) Lisa - http://www.workathomemomrevolution.blogspot.com/ |
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| August 19th, 2008 | Summer is Coming to an End |
The weather is beginning its seasonal change, slowly but surely. I told my husband that I think we will get an early snow this year, because the leaves are beginning to curl on the maple tree. Probably on Friday, I will begin the annual ritual of emptying out the pool so that we can close it on Saturday. The night time temperatures are causing the pool water temperature to drop into the 60’s and it would take several days and nights of warm temperatures to raise the water temperature, so we pretty much agree that the swimming season is finished - for this year. The doggies had fun, for sure, but now they can look forward to the snow time!! I grabbed the two containers of anti-freeze, that you pour into the return lines, last week and this week I only need to get one more 5-gallon container of chlorine. Last year my husband had a special pool cover made from this heavy heavy material. You cannot imagine how much I dread having to pull this monster over the pool. It is heavy when it is dry, can you imagine how bad it was when we pulled it off the pool this past Spring? Oh man… !!! One good thing that we did also last year is place a leaf/debris netting over the cover which reduced the amount of junk that fell into the pool when the cover was removed. Your vaccuuming time is greatly reduced when you use some sort of leaf/debris catcher on the cover. It is a bit of work to close the pool, but when my husband and I start on it, it usually only takes about an hour or so. There is an order to the completion of things and you have to make sure that it is done correctly so that your pool will open in the Spring without a problem. And once closed, then I do not have to mess with it again until we open it sometime in May or June. Soon the Canadian geese will be flying overhead… That is when you truly know that winter will be heading this way…
Posted in Life & Style | No Comments »
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Did you know that picking the right hospital could save your life?
You can feel it in the air, and you hear it on the news.
