South County Hospital Earns 'A' Grade In Safety

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, RI — South County Hospital earned top marks in hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in Spring 2019.

Newport Hospital, South County Hospital and Miriam Hospital all earned an "A" in this fall's rating.

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.

South County especially excelled in the "doctors, nurses and hospital staff," "problems with surgery" and "safety problems" categories, ranking above average in the following categories:

• Specially trained doctors for ICU patients
• Communication with doctors
• Communication with nurses
• Responsiveness of hospital staff
• Tracking and reducing risks to patients
• Air or gas bubbles in the blood
• Dangerous bed sores
• Patient falls and injuries
• Communication about medicines
• Communication about discharge
• Doctors ordering medication through computers
• Dangerous objects left in a patient's body
• Surgical wounds split open
• Death from serious, treatable conditions
• Serous breathing problem
• Dangerous blood clot
• C.diff infection
• Infection in the blood

The hospital did perform below average in several categories, including MRSA infections, enough qualified nurses and handwashing. Read the hospital's full report card here.

Maine, Utah, Virginia, Oregon and North Carolina had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Three states — Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

Here are the grades the rest of Rhode Island hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

• Newport Hospital: A
• South County Hospital: A
• The Miriam Hospital: A
• Landmark Medical Center: B
• Rhode Island Hospital: C
• Kent County Memorial Hospital: C
• Westerly Hospital: C

The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

"In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals," Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. "It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process."

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 performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to "produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors." The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)