By Dan Hounsell

Hospital safety has never been scrutinized more heavily than it has over the last 14 months as healthcare facilities have worked their way through the COVID-19 pandemic. So just how safe are the nation’s hospitals?

The Leapfrog Group, a national watchdog organization of employers and other purchasers focused on health care safety and quality, recently released the spring 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, which assign an A, B, C, D or F letter grade to more than 2,700 general acute-care hospitals in the United States. The grade is the only rating solely focused on a hospital’s ability to protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries, and infections.

The grade uses up to 27 national performance measures to grade hospitals using a methodology developed with guidance from experts in patient safety. This most recent data was collected immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights of findings from the spring grades 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.