The Fraser Health Authority is calling it misleading - an online report card from CBC ranks Burnaby Hospital among the worst five hospitals in the country for overall patient care.
Along with Ridge Meadows Hospital, Surrey Memorial Hospital, UBC Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital, Burnaby Hospital received a D grade - the lowest possible - in a study done for the Rate My Hospital Project, conducted by the CBC for its investigative show, the fifth estate.
The study is based on data collected by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) from about 240 acute-care hospitals across the country, as well as from public response on the CBC website.
The online survey allows people to rate Canadian hospitals on a scale of one to five in five categories: respect, communication, timeliness, cleanliness and would recommend to others.
Fraser Health spokesperson Roy Thorpe-Dorward said in a released statement that Fraser Health has concerns with the methodology of the survey and the way the data was used to report the quality of health-care at the hospitals.
"We appreciate the work that CBC has put into their hospital report card project, but believe that the CBC results show that it is difficult to compare results between jurisdictions when the methods hospitals use to keep track of data about quality of care vary widely," he said. "While we acknowledge the opportunities for improvement identified in the CBC report card, it would be misleading to judge the overall performance of a hospital based on this report alone."
The rating is based on five categories measuring how well patients do after surgery or medical treatment, including; mortality after major surgery, re-admission after surgery, re-admission after medical treatment, "nursing-sensitive adverse events" for surgical patients, and "nursing-sensitive adverse events" for medical patients. Except for the first category, for which the hospital gets an "A+," Burnaby Hospital gets a failing grade on the rest of the report.
Thorpe-Dorward noted the CBC ranked hospitals using only five of the 21 health indicators available from the CIHI, and that two of which are related to "nursing-sensitive adverse events," which he said are not consistently reported.
"If you look beyond the five indictors that CBC has chosen to use for its report, the CIHI data shows that Fraser Health hospitals have some of the best indicators in the province and nationally," he said, noting almost 90 per cent of patients in Fraser Health hospitals said their quality of care was "excellent, very good or good" in a survey conducted last year.
To see the Rate My Hospital project, visit www.cbc.ca/news/health/features/ratemyhospital.
