Sunday, July 16, 2006

We're No. 5! We're No. 5! - A sober look at population growth via Pheonix

We're No. 5! We're No. 5! No one could accuse Phoenix of having the nation's fifth-best health care system. That honor might go to Pittsburgh, with 46 hospitals and 336 doctors per 100,000 people. Metro Phoenix has 38 hospitals and 199 physicians per 100,000.
Pittsburgh is a place to heal, rehab and get an upper hand to wrangle with sickness.

3 comments:

Cope said...

Top notch healthcare facilities is actually a fairly common thing in former industrial powerhouses like Pittbsurgh. You can find the same thing in most Rust Belt cities, as well as places like Manchester, England. I saw it two years ago when I was in Dortmund, Germany, which is very close to being Pittsburgh's European equivalent.

There's been some compelling research out of the University of Pittsburgh on this phenomenom, and the findings are rather jarring. While places like Pittsburgh have some of the best healthcare facilities (and, more specifically, some of the best healthcare RESEARCH facilities), residents of these places often have the worst per capita ACCESS to healthcare.

Anonymous said...

I thought MD's were leaving PA in droves - at least that's what the tort "reform" activists claim.

Mark Rauterkus said...

Good observation.

But....

Researchers are not generally MDs. A few rare birds do both, but that is not what we've got cooking, mostly, here.

The research insitutions such as UPMC (and my wife is a researcher / clincian / director there) and Pitt are sitting in a different position than where we find the general MDs.

I think that PA has seen a big dip in the number of doctors in the state. But, I don't have the metrics -- and I wish I did.

Anyone?