I feel sorry for hospital administrators these days. While most businesses are trying to figure out how to keep their best and brightest employees in a down economy, hospitals are desperate to find any employees. It shows.

Far from the image of Florence Nightingale more than a century ago, fewer of today’s nurses act like they care. Not all of them, but from personal experience it’s an alarming number.

There’s one hospital in Tucson I will do whatever I can to avoid. But I don’t want to dwell on the negative. The hospital did our family a favor by driving us away. We discovered Phoenix Children’s Hospital. We had no idea what we were missing.

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As editor of Inside Tucson Business, a few weeks ago I received Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s annual report titled “The Most Important Day.” It’s an example of just why that hospital is different. The report had all of the usual statistics along with reports touting their successes. But interspersed with them were poignant personalized stories such as one about an aspiring young writer named Natalee who had to have emergency surgery on Christmas Eve 2003 for advanced, malignant brain tumors.

“Maybe one day, after she graduates from college and becomes a famous writer, she’ll look back on her experiences at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and include them in her autobiography,” the report noted.

There was another story about 10-year-old Alex who before he was 1-year-old was found to have pulmonary artesia (an abnormally developed heart in which only two valves were working). Despite spending his first year of life in Phoenix Children’s Hospital having numerous surgeries, Alex was able to start school on time. Each year he gets stronger and now even plays football.

A pediatric intensive care unit nurse says when a child’s “squeaky little voice ... asks for you by name at the age of 3, you know you made a difference in his life.”

These illustrate an atmosphere at Phoenix Children’s Hospital that is displayed in how employees treat others at that hospital. Indeed, even the cafeteria is better than most. Clearly, Phoenix Children’s Hospital has been able to communicate an attitude to its employees that each day is “the most important day” for someone there.

I don’t mean to imply Tucson hospitals are bad. An emergency room nurse at Northwest Hospital cared so much about one of our visits she stayed in contact with us for several weeks afterward. And when I wrote once before about an experience at another (unidentified) hospital’s emergency room, an official from Carondelet Health Network called to ask if it had happened at one of their hospitals. It hadn’t. But Carondelet was the only hospital that inquired.

It’s a struggle for hospital administrators, but contrary to what some of their employees might think, patients do have a choice. I appreciate that one local hospital made our experience there so miserable it gave us an opportunity to see a great hospital first hand.

 E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.