Calif Hospital Safety Grades: 87 Hospitals Get A Grade, 2 Get F

LOS ANGELES, CA —Eighty-seven California hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new Spring 2019 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group on Wednesday. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 32 percent earned an A grade, findings that were unchanged from the group’s last round of rankings released in Fall 2018. In California, 32 percent of hospitals earned an A grade.

The Leapfrog Group explains that its rating system is focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

Oregon, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts and Utah had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Four states — Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota — and the District of Columbia did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

Here are the grades California hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group: The vast majority of the hundreds of hospitals scattered across the Golden State received passing grades. In all dozens received A, B, and C grades. Click here to see how your local hospital scored.

Only two hospitals, however, earned outright F grades and just a handful garnered Ds. The hospitals you might want to avoid, according to the Leapfrog Group include:

F GRADES

• Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys: According to Leapfrog, this hospital is abysmal when it comes to hiring trained and qualified staff and communication and responsiveness among the staff is weak. It was also dinged for handwashing, the spread of infections and deaths from treatable complications.
• Lompoc Valley Medical Center in Lompoc: According to Leapfrog, communication and responsiveness among the staff is weak. It was also dinged for patients suffering from bed sores and accidental falls.

D GRADES

• Beverly Hospitalin Montebello,
• California Pacific Medical Center – Mission Bernal Campus in San Francisco
• Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura
• Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles
• Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles
• Memorial Hospital of Gardena in Gardena
• O'Connor Hospital in San Jose
• Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District in Brawley
• Rideout Memorial Hospital in Marysville
• San Leandro Hospital San Leandro
• Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose
• St. Joseph Health Saint Mary in Apple Valley
• Sutter East Bay Hospitals dba Alta Bates Summit Medical Center Alta Bates Campus in Berkeley
• Sutter Solano Medical Center in Vallejo
• Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center in San Francisco

For this round of rankings, the Leapfrog Group’s research found that patients at hospitals that receive “D” or “F” grades face a 92 percent greater risk of avoidable death compared to “A” hospitals. At “C” and “B” hospitals, patients on average face an 88 percent and a 35 percent greater risk respectively.

The group estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at “A” hospitals, 50,000 lives would have been saved. Overall, the researchers estimate that 160,000 lives are lost every year due to avoidable medical errors. That figure is down from 2016, when the Leapfrog Group estimated there were 205,000 avoidable deaths.

“The good news is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of progress on patient safety. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of needless death and harm in American hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “Hospitals don’t all have the same track record, so it really matters which hospital people choose, which is the purpose of our Hospital Safety Grade.”

Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes 28 measures that are taken together to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group uses performance measures from a variety of sources, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)