Up Close and Personal With Colorado Springs Health Care

My wife is having a hip replacement surgery today. We’ve had lots of experience with the health care systems of Colorado Springs with her mother (hip, knee and shoulder replacements, dialysis, and numerous other procedures). We’ve experienced 3 of the 4 area hospitals. We’ve met with countless surgeons and other specialists, many primary care physicians, paramedics and you name it. I thought I’d make few observations before surgery, because it doesn’t start for a few hours yet, and this is sort of a reflective time.

1. Our hospitals do a good job. The doctors and nurses are competent, and care. Things are clean and organized.  The food is tolerable (ok, what did you expect?) Today we’ll be at Penrose Main, but we’ve had good experiences at Memorial Central and Memorial North as well. The Memorial North facility is very new and nice, but they don’t do everything there. The Penrose – St Francis Medical Center at Powers and Woodmen looks very nice, but we are hoping we don’t have enough future needs to ever experience it. There are military medical facilities here as well, but since we are civilians, we really don’t have any experience with any of them. There is a clinic at the Air Force Academy, Peterson Air Force Base, and Evans Army Hospital at Ft Carson.
2. Health care in Colorado Springs is pretty convenient. It is hard to be more than 15 minutes from a hospital here. Although not all facilities do all things, general care, emergency rooms, etc are available at all 4 hospitals. Our niece lives in southern California, and is pregnant with her first child. We were very surprised when they told us that it is a full 40 minutes to where she will give birth, longer if there is any traffic (we are talking southern California. IF there is traffic? 🙂 )
3. There appears to be a good level of specialization available in Colorado Springs. While some rare diseases (it seems like more for children) require treatment in Denver (45 minutes to an hour away) where even more specialization is available, for the most part, anything you need is here. In fact, the trauma centers here really support a pretty wide area. At my wife’s class, there was a couple who said they are driving more than 2 hours for access to our hospitals.
4. Senior care is very good. Across the country, the population is aging. We’ve seen first hand that my wife’s mom is getting excellent care here, much better than she experienced in San Jose. That is a good thing, because she has really needed it!

Health care is a pretty big deal these days. We are very grateful that Colorado Springs has such good options available to us.