Pleasanton Hospital Receives "C" Hospital Safety Grade

A nationwide hospital safety analysis has found that 71 hospitals in California received an “A” grade for preventing medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections, which collectively are the third leading cause of death in America. On the flip side, 19 hospitals received a “D” or worse.

In the Tri-Valley area, the ValleyCare Health System in Pleasanton received a "C" overall score and the San Ramon Regional Medical Center earned a "B" score.

The Leapfrog Group released its bi-yearly hospital safety grades on Tuesday, finding that hospitals overall have improved in reducing the number of avoidable deaths. The group assessed roughly 2,500 hospitals. Of those, 30 percent earned an “A,” 28 percent earned a “B,” 35 percent a “C,” 6 percent a “D” and 1 percent an “F.”

“The national numbers on death and harm in hospitals have alarmed us for decades. What we see in the new round of Safety Grades are signs of many hospitals making significant improvements in their patient safety record,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a release.

ValleyCare released a statement regarding their grade:

"As one of the nation’s top-ranked hospitals for quality measures such as high patient survival and low infection rates, the quality of our care and the safety of our patients and employees are our top priorities.

"Hospital acquired infections are a challenge across the healthcare system, particularly for academic medical centers, whose patients have more complex conditions and are at a substantially higher risk of acquiring an infection. Stanford Health Care’s Standardized Infection Ratio (SIR) actually exceeds the industry benchmark. We are extremely proud of our Hospital Compare overall quality rating, which summarizes 57 quality measures and provides a hospital performance rating between 1-5 stars. Stanford Health Care’s current quality score on the Hospital Compare website is 4 stars, and only 22.4 percent of the more than 4,500 hospitals rated achieved 4 or 5 stars.

"Over the last two years, Stanford Health Care has made hospital acquired infections an area of major focus and launched several initiatives, including adoption of new operating room technology and a department-by-department partnership between the hospital and medical school to identify and address areas of improvement. While the Leapfrog report uses limited, older data, ratings based on more recent performance reflect the gains SHC’s new initiatives have produced."

The assessment system assigns school-style letter grades to general acute-care hospitals. The hope is to determine a patient’s risk of further injury or infection if they visit a certain hospital.

Among the findings nationally, five hospitals that received an “A” grade for the first time this year previously received an “F” grade, the group said, and 46 hospitals earned an “A” for the first time since the grading system began six years ago.

Leapfrog said its analysis showed 89 hospitals that had previously received “D” or “F” ratings had improved to an “A” this year.

Rhode Island, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Idaho all previously ranked near the bottom of the state rankings with low percentages of “A” hospitals, but now all rank in the top 10.

Here are some of the other findings:

• The five states with the highest percentage of “A” hospitals this spring are Hawaii, Idaho, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Virginia
• Ten states have hospitals with “F” grades are California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey and New York

Find a full list of California hospitals here.

Leapfrog says you shouldn’t refuse emergency care because of a bad safety grade. They’re meant to be used as a guide for planned events and a research tool for potential emergencies.

Patch reporters Dan Hampton and Feroze Dhanoa contributed to this report.

Photo via Shutterstock