Dive Brief:
- Hospitals have made progress in reducing preventable errors, accidents and injuries over the past decade, according to the Leapfrog Group’s fall 2022 hospital safety grades released Wednesday.
- Incidents of falls and trauma and of objects unintentionally left in a body after surgery decreased by about 25% since 2012, according to Leapfrog.
- In this year’s fall rankings, 30% of hospitals earned an A grade, 28% earned a B, 36% earned a C, 6% earned a D and 1% earned an F.
Dive Insight:
This year marks the 10th in which Leapfrog has assigned letter grades to nearly 3,000 hospitals, using measures to determine how well they protect patients from preventable safety incidents.
“For a long time, the health care community tried to improve safety, but progress stalled,” Leapfrog’s president and CEO Leah Binder said in a release.
“The big difference over this decade is that for the first time, we publicly reported each hospital’s record on patient safety, and that galvanized the kind of change we all hoped for. It’s not enough change, but we are on the right track,” she said.
The latest grades vary slightly from last fall, when 32% of hospitals received A grades, 26% received B grades and 35% received C grades.
In this fall’s scores, New Hampshire, Virginia, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida had the highest percentage of hospitals scoring an A.
North Dakota, Vermont and the District of Columbia had no hospitals scoring A grades.
While hospitals reduced patient safety events over the past decade based on Leapfrog’s report, it's less clear where and if any progress or backtracking may have occurred over the past few years during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Healthcare-associated infections were on the decline pre-pandemic, according to Leapfrog. But rates of MRSA worsened from spring to fall 2022, while rates of C.Diff improved, according to an email from Leapfrog group.
Other studies have found hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant infections grew during the pandemic as hospitals boosted their use of antibiotics, reducing their effectiveness.
Hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant infections grew 15% from 2019 to 2020, with personal protective equipment and staffing shortages and longer patient stays also contributing to the rise, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.