Why do small hospitals get a bad rap sometimes? - page 2

Is it actually the size of the hospital or the location that makes the difference?
I come from a small town and have grown up hearing the horror stories of the local hospital. Have been blessed and only been a patient in ER once. I picked my pcp by hospital affiliation so that I would NOT have to use this hospital.

I work in a hospital with 250 IP beds and numerous clinic and OP beds. The hospital is in a major city, surrounded by several 700+ IP bed hospitals. We are the only primary ped hospital for hundred's of miles, so this may be the reason, but we do not suffer from the "small hospitals rap". We have a wonderful reputation. NOW, what is very irritating about the smaller hospitals is, as a previous post stated, they often hold their patients too long before transferring. We routinely receive kids who are septic because they have been laying in a rural hospital for a week with a ruptured appy, being treated for gastroenteritis.

I tend to think the public sees it like this: bigger hospitals have more $$. More $$ buys better technology. Better technology draws better doctors. Also, small hospitals are in small areas. When something goes wrong in a small town, everyone knows five minutes after it happens. Something goes wrong in a big hospital, in a big city, the word is not likely to reach all the areas it pulls patients from.

just mho

I work CV-ICU in a 500+ bed facility, and we frequently get transfers from small community hospitals outside our metro area. Of all of the small hospitals we get patients from, there is only one that has a bad reputation-- when we here we are getting a pt. from there; we know it will be sick, possibly septic, and we automatically assign that pt. as a 1:1. I have warned my husband and kids to not even THINK of going to that town because "if you have a MVA, you'll end up in that hospital, you'll probably die." I don't think it's the nursing care there; it just seems like that doctor "practices" medicine and hasn't a clue how to cure pts.