NUMC Gets A 'C' In Patient Safety

How safe is your hospital? New grades released Tuesday by The Leapfrog Group will tell you just that. The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit founded by employers and healthcare providers, ranked 23 Long Island hospitals as part of its fall 2017 safety grades

Just one Long Island hospital received an A, while none received an F. Most hospitals landed with B and C grades, while three received a D. (scroll down for rankings)

The only Long Island hospital to receive an A grade was John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson. In the 2017 spring rankings, two Long Island hospitals received an A grade and just one received a D.

The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. The recent grades show that five states — Oregon, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Idaho — exhibit significant improvement since the safety grades were first implemented in 2012.

“Errors and infections in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America, and people deserve to know which of their hospitals are best at preventing them,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a press release.

Medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections are taken into account by Leapfrog when calculating the grades. The goal of the rankings is to determine a patient’s risk of further injury or infection if they visit a certain hospital.

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 27 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.)

Here are the grades Long Island hospitals received, according to Leapfrog:

A

• John T. Mather Memorial Hospital, Port Jefferson

B

• Eastern Long Island Hospital, Greenport
• Northwell Health - Huntington Hospital, Huntington
• NYU Winthrop Hospital, Mineola
• Southampton Hospital, Southampton
• St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center, Smithtown
• St. Charles Hospital, Port Jefferson
• St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn

C

• Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, West Islip
• Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park
• Long Island Jewish Valley Stream, Valley Stream
• Mercy Medical Center, Rockville Centre
• Nassau University Medical Center, East Meadow
• North Shore University Hospital, Manhasset
• Northwell Health System - Glen Cove Hospital, Glen Cove
• Northwell Health System - Syosset Hospital, Syosset
• Peconic Bay Medical Center, Riverhead
• South Nassau Communities Hospital, Oceanside
• St. Joseph Hospital, Bethpage
• Stony Brook University Hospital, Stony Brook

D

• Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center, Patchogue
• Northwell Health System - Plainview Hospital, Plainview
• Northwelll Health System - Southside Hospital, Bay Shore

Leapfrog notes that of the 2,632 hospitals graded in Tuesday’s update, 832 earned an “A,” 662 a “B,” 964 a “C,” 159 a “D” and 15 an “F.”

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