Springfield Hospital Keeps 'C' Safety Grade: Nonprofit Group

SPRINGFIELD, PA – Leapfrog, a nonprofit group that ranks hospitals' safety, released its most recent finding, and Springfield Hospital's grade stayed on the lower end of the range.

For the sixth time in a row, Springfield Hospital earned a C grade in Leapfrogs biannual rankings.

The last time the hospital earned anything higher than a C was in fall 2015 when it earned a B.

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 medication administration safety, patient fall rates, and the number of qualified nurses on staff.

It got poor marks in areas such as communication about medicines, C. diff infection rates, and dangerous blood clot 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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