Safety, Staff Problems Gives Park Slope Hospital D Rating: Study

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Brooklyn Methodist Hospital was one of 15 in the city that earned a D grade in an biannual hospital safety grades report published by experts at Leapfrog, earning low scores for its safety and staffing practices.

The hospital, which struggled earlier this year with a legionella outbreak that dragged on for months, earned its lowest scores in the "safety problems" and "doctors nurses and hospital staff" categories. It even earning the lowest score in the country for one item, which measures the number of times patients had an air or gas bubble in the blood for every 1,000 people discharged.

The low scores in the safety problems category also included its record of patients with bed sores and falls or injuries. In the staffing category, the hospital was not scored in several items it failed to report, but earned low numbers in measurements such as the number of specially trained doctors for Intensive Care Unit patients, for which it received a 35 out of 100.

The score, though, doesn't put Brooklyn Methodist at the bottom of the list for the city's hospitals. In this year's report, one hospital earned an F grade, 15 earned a D, 24 earned a C, four earned a B and only one earned an A.

The numbers do show an increase in "B" hospitals and a decrease in "F" hospitals, which is an encouraging trend compared to the Fall 2018 rankings.

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.

For this round of rankings, the Leapfrog Group's research found that patients at hospitals that receive "D" or "F" grades face a 92 percent greater risk of avoidable death compared to "A" hospitals. At "C" and "B" hospitals, patients on average face an 88 percent and a 35 percent greater risk respectively.

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.)