Somers Point's Shore Medical Center Receives 'A' Safety Grade

SOMERS POINT, NJ — Shore Medical Center received an A grade in 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.

Maine, Utah, Virginia, Oregon and North Carolina had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Three states — Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

The Leapfrog Group, a national watchdog organization, has given Shore Medical Center an A 11 straight times in the biannual grading. Related article: New NJ Hospital Safety Ratings Released: 2 Get 'D' Grade

"With Shore Medical Center's 11 consecutive 'A' ratings in hospital safety, we have proven time and time again that everyone at Shore is 100 percent committed to doing everything possible to keep our patients safe, every minute of every day," said Valerie M DeJoseph, an administrative director at Shore Medical Center. "We are extremely proud of this recognition, and thank our staff for their ongoing dedication to providing healthcare at its best."

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,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “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.)

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