Health & Fitness

Virginia Hospital Safety Ratings: 2 Earn 'D' Grades, 35 Get 'A'

Virginia has 35 hospitals with an A grade and two that earned a D, according to biannual hospital safety ratings from Leapfrog.

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More than half of Virginia hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to spring 2019 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group. The only state with a higher percentage of A-rated hospitals than Virginia was Oregon, where 58 percent of hospitals received an A grade; in Virginia, the percentage was 53 percent.

Across the country, 32 percent of hospitals earned an A grade, according to Leapfrog, the nonprofit watchdog that graded more than 2,600 general acute-care hospitals nationwide.

Leapfrog Group focused its ratings entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the organization twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

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Of the 66 hospitals in Virginia, the ratings released Wednesday showed that 35 received an A grade, 15 got a B, 14 earned a C and 2 were given Ds.

Oregon, Virginia, Maine and Massachusetts had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade in the spring 2019 hospital safety ratings. The District of Columbia and four states — Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

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Here are the grades Virginia hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

A Grade

B Grade

C Grade

D Grade

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 35 percent greater risk respectively.

The group estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at A hospitals, then 50,000 lives would have been saved nationwide. Overall, the researchers estimate that 160,000 lives are lost every year due to avoidable medical errors. That figure is down from 2016, when the Leapfrog Group estimated there were 205,000 avoidable deaths.

“The good news is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of progress on patient safety. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of needless death and harm in American hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “Hospitals don’t all have the same track record, so it really matters which hospital people choose, which is the purpose of our Hospital Safety Grade.”

Leapfrog assigns A, B, C, D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Each safety grade includes 28 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. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

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