Local Residents Rank Valley Hospitals

Residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area are highly mixed in their hospital preferences, and location appears to play a major role in determining patients’ hospital selections. These are just two of the lessons drawn from a new, special edition of the O’Neil Associates Valley Monitor Poll, which asked 459 Maricopa County adults the following question:

If money were no obstacle and you had unrestricted choice of any hospital in the Valley, which hospital would you choose for a planned medical procedure that required hospitalization?

Excluding the county medical center, which was mentioned by less than one percent of the respondents, the three largest hospitals in the Valley are also the three most preferred. But all three do even better, substantially so, than one would predict based on their relative sizes. For example, the two Samaritan hospitals together account for more than one fourth of the responses we received, while they only supply about one seventh of the county’s hospital beds. A third Samaritan hospital (Maryvale), however, did somewhat worse than one might expect; it is the preferred hospital of less than one percent Valleywide.

Otherwise, most area hospitals were mentioned by roughly the same proportion of respondents as their share of the county’s acute-care beds—the one remaining notable exception being the Mayo Clinic, which was mentioned by seven percent of all respondents (fourth place overall) despite being a bedless outpatient clinic, not a hospital in the traditional sense. This, combined with the fact that 14 percent of the respondents said ‘don’t know,’ suggests that there is a substantial amount of confusion and uncertainty among Valley residents regarding the area’s hospital offerings.

Hospital Preferences Vary Greatly by Valley Region

Location plays a major role in shaping people’s hospital preferences, and each region of the Valley has its own distinctive hospital-preference pattern. For example, Desert Samaritan is the most preferred hospital among East Valley residents, with a 26-percent market share, while Mesa Lutheran (11%) and Valley Lutheran (10%) come in second and third. However, these three hospitals are much less popular outside of the East Valley, where they are the preferred hospitals of less than a combined two percent of the population. Instead, Good Samaritan and St. Joseph’s reign over Phoenix and the West Valley; Lincoln and Phoenix Baptist also are relatively prominent in Phoenix, while Boswell and Thunderbird Samaritan show well in the West Valley. Scottsdale and its northeast-Valley neighbors, meanwhile, constitute a market of their own, with the Mayo Clinic and the two branches of Scottsdale Memorial at the top. In short, no hospital has distinguished itself in the public’s eye as the hospital providing the highest-quality care and service in the metropolitan-Phoenix area; only St. Joseph’s and Good Samaritan demonstrate a truly significant presence in all regions of the Valley, and even these two hospitals don’t do particularly well in the East Valley.

Hospital Preferences by Valley Region

Other Submarket Variations

Other notable findings of our study include the following:

The two Lutheran hospitals perform much better among older respondents than younger. Together, Mesa and Valley Lutheran hospitals were mentioned by only three percent of the respondents under fifty years old, but twelve percent of those between fifty and sixty-four and fifteen percent of those sixty-five years or older. The Mayo Clinic also performs relatively well among older respondents, while Good Samaritan, St. Joseph’s, and Desert Samaritan perform better among younger respondents than they do among older respondents.

Two fifths of the respondents reporting household incomes of $60,000 or more prefer Good Samaritan (22%) and St. Joseph’s (21%). In contrast, the Lutheran hospitals do relatively poorly among these high-income respondents; together, Mesa and Valley Lutheran are the preferred hospital of only two percent of those in the $60,000-plus category, compared to the twelve percent share they enjoy among households earning less than $45,000 per year.

St. Joseph’s is the favorite hospital among respondents who have lived in Arizona more than fifteen years, mentioned by 24 percent of this group. But it remains virtually unknown to those who have lived in the state for less than fifteen years; only three percent of these relatively recent arrivals said St. Joseph’s would be their first choice. In contrast, the Mayo Clinic does better among recent arrivals (12%) than among long-time Arizona residents (3%).

These results are based on 459 interviews we conducted with randomly selected heads of household in metropolitan Phoenix. The "sampling error" associated with a survey of this size is approximately ±4.6 percent. This means that the chances are approximately 95 in 100 that we would have obtained the same results, within a margin of ±4.6%, had we interviewed every adult resident of Maricopa County.