31 Outstanding New Jersey Hospitals Earn ‘A’ Grade For Safety
A new medical drama streaming on Max got me thinking about hospital safety.
It's called The Pitt, and the series follows an understaffed Pittsburgh ER overrun by patients with various illnesses.
It's a reminder that even the slightest mistake could result in grave outcomes.
The hospital business is kind of in my blood. My Dad spent most of his life as a hospital administrator.
This gave me a unique insight into what goes into hospital safety, and more importantly, the people who keep us well.
While healing at a hospital is truly a group effort, one group of folks is the heartbeat of a hospital. They are the heroes who keep us alive without hesitation. Nurses.
I always remember my father telling me that above all else, his job was to make his nursing staff's jobs as smooth as possible. Without them, there would be chaos.
Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade details how a lack of safety can affect hospital patients. They report:
- Hospital-related mistakes, infections, and accidents contribute to nearly 200,000 deaths annually.
- Around 1 in 31 hospital patients contracts an infection that could have been avoided.
- Medicare patients face a 1 in 4 risk of harm, injury, or even death during a hospital stay.
- Every day, over 500 people lose their lives due to preventable hospital mistakes.
READ MORE: New Jersey's Leading Causes of Death Revealed
Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade explains how it arrives at their letter grade for New Jersey hospitals.
The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses up to 30 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources. Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade methodology has been peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Patient Safety.
Some of the 30 national performance measures include the number of infections once a patient enters the hospital, problems with surgery, such as an instrument being left inside a patient, death from serious treatable complications, air or gas bubbles in the blood, staff working together to prevent errors, and responsiveness of hospital staff.
An impressive 31 New Jersey hospitals have earned an 'A' grade from Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade.
These 31 NJ Hospitals Earn an 'A' For Safety
Gallery Credit: Matt Ryan
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