Last month (April 2012) The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) released an online database that compares several patient outcomes for many Canadian hospitals.

A visual examination of eleven indicators quickly reveals how adult hospitals within central Toronto, Scarborough, Mississauga compared to each other.  We grouped Academic and community hospitals together and display the data using side-by-side heat maps.

The darker a blue box the worse patient outcomes were for that hospital.

The heat map on the left compares rates per 1000 patients and the heat map on the right compares outcomes per 100 patients.

Academic hospitals report a median of twelve percent more nursing adverse events(*) for surgical patients and seventeen percent more nursing adverse events for medical patients.  The academic hospitals have higher rates compared to the provincial average while the community hospitals are slightly below this benchmark.

(*) A nursing adverse event is either a: urinary tract infection; pressure ulcer; in-hospital fracture; or pneumonia.