November 7, 2023- The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit driving a movement for patient safety, released its fall 2023 Hospital Safety Grades, assigning a letter grade to nearly 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents and infections.
The latest grades show hospitals reducing health care-acquired infections (HAIs) post-pandemic, after significant increases in infection rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cycle, nearly 30% of hospitals earned an “A,” 24% earned a “B,” 39% earned a “C,” 7% earned a “D,” and less than 1% earned an “F.”
Utah is the state with the highest percentage of “A” hospitals in the country this fall. After Utah, the top ten states for “A” hospitals are: Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Connecticut, Montana, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. States with the least favorable performance are Vermont, Wyoming, Delaware, Washington, DC, and North Dakota, where no hospitals earned an “A.”
The new grades are the first to reflect hospital performance post-pandemic. Nationally, hospitals significantly reduced three HAIs—Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI)—after CLABSI, MRSA and CAUTI reached a 5-year high during the pandemic.
The latest data shows that over 85% of hospitals have improved performance on at least one of the three dangerous infections the Hospital Safety Grade accounts for. That includes:
- 19% of hospitals have improved in all three infection measures,
- 66% of hospitals have improved at least one infection measure, and
- 16% of hospitals have continued to worsen or made no improvement.