Lankenau Medical Center Slips In Safety Rankings: Nonprofit Group

WYNNEWOOD, PA – Leapfrog, a nonprofit group that ranks hospitals' safety, released its most recent finding, and Lankenau Medical Center's grade has slipped.

After getting B grades in the last four reports, Lankenau was bumped down to a C grade in the fall 2018 report.

The last time Lankenau earned an A grade was in spring 2016.

It's one of 46 Pennsylvania hospitals to earn a C.

See the full list of PA hospital ranks here.

The hospital earned high marks for their communication about medicines, C. diff and urinary tract infection rates, and communication with doctors and nurses.

It got poor marks in areas such as staff responsiveness, safe medication administration, blood infection rates. See the full breakdown here.

"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.

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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