Grades Released Ranking Safety At Tampa Bay Hospitals

TAMPA BAY, FL — Eight Tampa Bay hospitals received an A grade 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.

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.

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 Tampa Bay hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

• Bayfront Health St. Petersburg- C
• St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg - D
• Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg - B
• St. Petersburg General Hospital - B
• Palms of Pasadena Hospital in St. Petersburg - C
• Largo Medical Center - A
• Memorial Hospital of Tampa - B
• Tampa General Hospital - B
• Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater - D
• South Bay Hospital in Sun City Center - B
• St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa - C
• St. Joseph's Hospital South in Riverview - C
• AdventHealth Carrollwood - A
• Mease Dunedin Hospital - D
• Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor - C
• Brandon Regional Hospital - A
• AdventHealth Tampa - A
• St. Joseph's Hospital North in Lutz - C
• AdventHealth North Pinellas in Tarpon Springs - A
• Medical Center of Trinity - A
• Morton Plant North Bay Hospital - D
• AdventHealth Wesley Chapel - A
• South Florida Baptist Hospital in Plant City - C

AdventHealth has the only hospitals in the city of Tampa to receive an A grade (AdventHealth Tampa and AdventHealth Carrollwood).

Its hospitals in Wesley Chapel, Sebring, Zephyrhills, Lake Placid and North Pinellas all received an A as well.

In addition to receiving the top grade from Leapfrog, the company noted that AdventHealth North Pinellas, which received its 12th consecutive A grade from Leapfrog, has gone an entire year without a MRSA case since implementing Nozin, a nasal sterilizer antiseptic, last year in addition to other safety protocols.

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.)