The number of errors, injuries and infections at area hospitals are declining, causing some medical centers in D.C. and Northern Virginia to make top grades on a national report card.
The Leapfrog Group, a safety watchdog organization, released its national hospital rankings this week and discovered that for the first time, some D.C. medical centers are scoring high.
“When you put D.C. among the states, it’s 11th in terms of the percentage of hospitals that earn an ‘A,’” said Leah Binder, the group’s president and CEO. “That is outstanding, considering that over the past decade D.C. has always ranked in the bottom.”
Leapfrog surveyors grade hospitals on 30 measure points, including the numbers of errors and accidents among staffers, and injuries and infections among patients. They gather the public information from an agency that runs Medicare.
Binder said when a hospital improves in these categories and moves up in its ranking, it usually means that more resources and effort are being spent on staff training.
“Some systems like MedStar have put in an enormous amount of focus on really keeping their patients safe from errors and infections,” she told WTOP. “Those are the kinds of things that can kill patients.”
Better safety measures created to stamp out common accidents and injuries are so effective they even work during public health emergencies, Binder said.
“Hospitals that can prevent the kinds of errors and accidents that are a problem for patients, we find that they can prevent them even when there’s a respiratory virus going around and they have a lot of extra patients,” she said. “It’s harder to do it when you have a lot of patients waiting for care or when a contagion is going around. But the hospitals that know how to do it, do it.”
Around the region, many Maryland medical centers are locked in the A/B grade group. And several Northern Virginia hospitals, like Inova and Sentara, are still making straight As two years in a row.
It’s a distinction that’s tough to maintain, Binder said.
“That’s an extraordinary achievement,” she said. “It’s a tribute to a hospital’s leadership that has said, ‘We are going to put a stake in the ground. Our patients come first, and we will not give up on that mission.’”
WTOP’s Andrew Alsobrooks contributed to this report.
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