Christiana Care Earns “A” patient safety grade

Christiana Care Health System has received an “A” Hospital Safety Score from The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit group dedicated to improving safety, quality and affordability of health care.

This is the third consecutive “A” score for Christiana Care. The top grade reflects Christiana Care’s commitment to quality and safety, placing the health system among the nation’s safest hospitals. Only 31 percent of hospitals received an “A” grade.

“Achieving an ‘A’ on the Hospital Safety Score reflects our commitment to patient safety and serving our patients as partners in their health,” said Sharon Anderson, senior vice president of Quality and Patient Safety at Christiana Care. “Our priority is creating safe and high quality health care for our patients. This recognition testifies to the hard work of our doctors, nurses and entire hospital team.”

The Leapfrog Group uses a wide range of publicly available data to assign grades to U.S. hospitals based on their overall ability to keep patients safe from infections, injuries and medical errors. It is the only hospital safety rating to be peer-reviewed in the Journal of Patient Safety and provides the public information they can use to protect themselves and their families.

The nonprofit group assigned scores to more than 2,600 U.S. hospitals as part of its Hospital Safety Score initiative. Leapfrog bases scores on preventable medical errors, injuries, accidents and infections.

Calculated under the guidance of The Leapfrog Group’s nine-member Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 26 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from infections, injuries, and medical and medication errors.

Besides The Leapfrog Group, the measures come from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American Hospital Association. The measures include:

• Surgical infection prevention.
• Falls and trauma.
• Central line associated bloodstream infection.
• Post-operative pulmonary embolism/deep vein thrombosis.

Members of the Blue Ribbon panel include: John Birkmeyer (University of Michigan), Ashish Jha (Harvard University), Lucian Leape (Harvard University), Arnold Millstein (Stanford University), Peter Pronovost (Johns Hopkins University), Patrick Romano (University of California, Davis), Sara Singer (Harvard University), Tim Vogus (Vanderbilt University), and Robert Wachter (University of California, San Francisco).