St. Clare's Hospitals Receive C Grade For Safety, Nonprofit Says

DOVER, NJ — St. Clare's Hospitals in Dover and Denville were given a C health grade by nonprofit group Leapfrog.

Both hospitals had higher-than-average rates of infections, including MRSA, blood infections, and urinary tract infections infections. They also both had higher than usual rates of patient falls and air bubbles on the blood, Leapfrog said.

Communication is an issue at both hospitals, Leapfrog said. According to their report, patients at St. Clare's are unhappy with how nurses and doctors communicate with them, and say hospital staff is unresponsive.

The amount of serious surgical complications, including death, are generally below average at both hospitals. Serious breathing problems are the only complication either hospital has an average rate of.

"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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