Mississippi Hospital Safety Grades

Before you are admitted to a hospital to receive medical care, you may want to take some time and find out how safe the hospital is. There are a few different ways to check on hospital safety. LeapFrog has a Hospital Safety Grade, which assess more than 2,500 hospitals throughout the United States twice each year. The scores you see now are from the fall and they will do another round of reviews in the fall. You can discover if your hospital has improved or if their score has dropped recently.

Last Spring, Mississippi Today covered a story about 13 hospitals in the Magnolia state which received an “A” in safety by the nonprofit health safety advocate group, LeapFrog. The group gave that “A” rating to 39 percent of the 33 hospitals that completed the group’s survey. The 13 “A” grades places Mississippi 16th nationally in patient safety rankings. This, according to Mississippi Today, is a dramatic improvement over the past few years when LeapFrog gave an “A” to just two Mississippi hospitals in 2015.

Hospital safety is a vitally important issue, as each year more than 350,000 Americans die from hospital-acquired illnesses and injuries, according to the Journal of Patient Safety. LeapFrog reports that patients are 50% more likely to die of an illness of from an accident at a hospital with a C or D grade.

Marcella McKay, chief operating officer at Mississippi Hospital Association said of the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson, which received a D rating and an F in patient safety in 2015, “(UMMC) is taking care of some of the sickest and most complex illnesses in the state. We are very careful of comparing one hospital to another. We tend to have a hospital look at its own trends over time. What really matters is if a specific hospital is really getting better at improving quality year after year.”

LeapFrog gets its data from a self-reported survey, and from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which can be two years old. So, while things are steadily improving, the rating will remain low until the data catches up with what is happening. Dr. Michael Henderson, UMMCs chief medical officer, who was hired to improve the hospital’s safety outcomes said that the F score was a wake-up call for the hospital to improve quality.

Another measure of hospital quality

Consumer Reports also rates hospital quality and safety and they also generate a safety score. They publish a searchable ratings database where you can search local hospitals by city, state and zip code and receive information about each institution’s safety score and whether they have improved, gotten worse or remained the same. Their hospital ratings come from data based on patient experience and outcomes, and hospital practices gathered from public sources.

If you or someone you care about has suffered an injury because of medical negligence, a Mississippi medical malpractice attorney from Merkel & Cocke, P.A. is ready to discuss your case and offer sound advice about how to proceed.

From our Jackson office, at Merkel & Cocke, P.A., we are proud to represent clients throughout Mississippi, including in Jackson, Tupelo, Clarksdale, and throughout the Gulf Coast region, who have suffered injuries because of medical negligence. We also serve clients in Tennessee and Arkansas. Please call 601-653-1103 or complete our contact form to schedule a free consultation now.