See What Grades Each Virtua Hospital Earned For Safety

Virtua Hospital locations throughout South Jersey received grades ranging from A to C for hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in Spring 2019.

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.

Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes in Camden earned an A.The Virtua hospitals in Marlton, Voorhees and Willingboro each earned a B. Virtua Mount Holly earned a C.

“Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes has an established culture of patient safety that is shared by all levels of the organization,” Virtua Health President and CEO Dennis W. Pullin said. “This commitment to the highest levels of safety and quality, coupled with advanced services like cardiac surgery and transplant, cement the hospital as being among the best in region and an important part of the new Virtua.”

“Patient safety fuels everyone’s actions — it’s at the core of our mission. Colleagues are encouraged to speak up for safety and stop the line if they believe something may be wrong,” Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes and Virtua Willingboro Senior Vice President and COO Mark Nessel said. “I am proud of our staff and their commitment to the good of our communities.”

The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

“In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals,” Leapfrog President and CEO Leah Binder said. “It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process.”

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 performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

See related: New NJ Hospital Safety Ratings Released: 2 Get 'D' Grade