Westwood Hospital Earns A 'B' For Safety

WESTWOOD, NJ — Hackensack University Medical Center at Pascack Valley earned a B in safety, according to a new list of grades released by The Leapfrog Group Tuesday.

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

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 hospital scored "above average" in several categories, including ensuring a patient's safety during and safety surgery, training staff on proper hand-washing techniques and preventing bed sores.

Leapfrog 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.)

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