Hackettstown Hospital Receives C Grade For Safety, Nonprofit Says

HACKETTSTOWN, NJ — Hackettstown Regional Medical Center was given a C health grade for safety by nonprofit group Leapfrog.

There are high rates of three serious surgical complications at the hospital: collapsed lung, serious breathing problem, and blood clots. Preventable deaths, however, are low at the hospital, Leapfrog said.

Communication is an issue at the hospital, Leapfrog said. According to their report, patients at Hackettstown are unhappy with how nurses and doctors communicate with them, and say hospital staff is unresponsive. Patients also say communication and medications and discharge is not good enough.

The hospital has a mixed record when it comes to infections. Urinary tract infections are high, but C.diff infections are low. The hospital did not provide information about the rates of MRSA, blood infections or surgical site infections for colon surgeries.

Hackettstown Regional Medical Center has received a C rating four times in a row now, dating back to Spring 2016. They received a B in Fall 2015, but had previously been given Cs in Spring 2015, and all of 2014.

"Errors and infections in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America, and people deserve to know which of their hospitals are best at preventing them," Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a press release.

Medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections are taken into account by Leapfrog when calculating the grades. The goal of the rankings is to determine a patient's risk of further injury or infection if they visit a certain hospital.

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 27 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.

The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. The grades released on Tuesday showed that five states — Oregon, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Idaho — showed significant improvement since the safety grades were first implemented in 2012.

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