Does Your Hospital Make the Grade?
The Leapfrog Group shared its Hospital Safety Grade. This resource evaluates U.S. hospitals, focusing on how safe they are. More specifically, these grades are “based on how well [hospitals] prevent medical errors, accidents, injuries, and infections that kill or harm patients.”
The most recent grades factor in post-operative sepsis, a condition that “kills over 270,000 people a year.” What’s more, Black patients are twice as likely as White patients to contract sepsis, and sepsis is considered the “costliest” problem for hospitals.
Knowledge is power, and the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade enables patients to search hospitals and find out their ratings, so they can choose a hospital that meets their needs. Leapfrog’s data is “peer-reviewed, fully transparent, and free to the public.” Furthermore, just as students work hard to earn high grades, many hospitals work hard to reduce errors and achieve good Leapfrog grades.
However, there is a wide range in Leapfrog grades among hospitals. While more than 50% of hospitals throughout the United States earned As and Bs in the most recent report, 35% got Cs, 2% ended up with Ds, and fewer than 1% (but not 0%) received Fs. This indicates that there is an alarmingly wide range in the quality of care being delivered in U.S. hospitals.
In the Cleveland area, we are lucky that no hospital earned a D or an F. But there are as many C ratings as there are Bs (11 of each) and only 6 hospitals earned an A rating. According to Leapfrog, choosing a hospital “could be a life or death decision.” And we all know that in an emergency situation, we don’t always have a choice – we go (or are transported) straight to the nearest hospital.
Of course, just because a hospital receives a good Leapfrog grade doesn’t mean that all of the care delivered there will be good quality care. Even at high-ranking hospitals, patients are sometimes injured through carelessness.
Every patient deserves to be cared for in a safe hospital. If you or a loved one has been injured by poor care in a hospital – no matter its Leapfrog grade – please call our experienced Cleveland malpractice lawyers to discuss your options for legal recourse and for obtaining the compensation you deserve. To schedule your free consultation, call 216-287-0900 or contact us online today.