Health & Fitness

Florida Hospital Safety Grades 2021: The Best And The Worst

Safety grades by the health care watchdog group Leapfrog show how hospitals in Florida responded to the coronavirus pandemic.

Deb Belt's profile picture
Deb Belt, Patch StaffVerified Patch Staff Badge

FLORIDA — Seventy-six Florida hospitals received top safety marks while others didn’t quite measure up in The Leapfrog Group’s annual spring safety grades released Thursday.

The nonprofit health care watchdog group grades hospitals twice a year, assigning letter grades from “A” to “F” based on each hospital's ability to protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries and infections.

More than 2,700 general, acute-care U.S. hospitals were assessed for Leapfrog’s Spring Safety Grades. Among those hospitals, 27 have achieved 19 consecutive “A” grades in every biannual grading cycle since Leapfrog launched the safety grades in spring 2012.

Find out what's happening in Tampafor free with the latest updates from Patch.

In Florida:

  • 76 hospitals received an A grade.
  • 48 hospitals received a B grade.
  • 53 hospitals received a C grade.
  • 2 hospitals received a D grade.
  • 0 hospitals received an F grade.

It’s worth noting the hospitals were graded during a time of extraordinary pressure on the health care system due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Find out what's happening in Tampafor free with the latest updates from Patch.

“This pandemic emphasized how much we rely on America’s health care workforce,” Leapfrog Group President and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release. “Our straight ‘A’ hospitals remind us how preparedness protected their patients as well as their workforce and created a high level of organizational resilience.”

Here are the Leapfrog Group's spring 2021 grades for hospitals in Florida:

Grade "A"

Grade "B"

Grade "C"

Grade "D"

There were no "F" grades.

Across all states, highlights of findings from the spring 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade include:

  • Thirty-three percent of hospitals received an "A," 24 percent received a "B," 35 percent received a "C," 7 percent received a "D," and less than 1 percent received an "F."
  • Five states with the highest percentages of "A" hospitals are Massachusetts, Idaho, Maine, Virginia, and North Carolina.
  • There were no "A" hospitals in South Dakota or North Dakota.

To determine each state’s grade, Leapfrog used up to 28 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources. When averaged, performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.

The goal of the Hospital Safety Grade is to reduce deaths caused by hospital errors and injuries.

Leapfrog estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at "A" hospitals, 50,000 lives at other facilities would have been saved. 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 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is peer-reviewed by a panel of national experts, and the Leapfrog Group receives guidance from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

More from Tampa