If you have a health emergency, the last thing you want to have to worry about is whether the hospital you are being treated in is unsafe.
Yet this is very real concern. More than 200,000 people die every year from preventable hospital errors, injuries, accidents, and infections – the equivalent of around 550 per day – according to multiple studies.
Now, thanks to exclusive new data provided to DailyMail.com, you can find out this vital information in advance by entering your zip code into our interactive map.
Analysts at Leapfrog Hospital Safety graded more than 3,000 general acute care hospitals across the nation from A to F.
The ratings are based on factors such as the number of medical errors, accidents and hospital-acquired infections reported by each center over the past 12 months.
Director of healthcare ratings at Leapfrog, Katie Stewart, told DailyMail.com: ‘Hospitals with an ‘F’ grade rank in the bottom 1 percent nationally for patient safety.
‘Patients treated in hospitals with a ‘D’ or ‘F’ grade are twice as likely to die from preventable errors compared to those in hospitals with an ‘A’ Grade.’
And there are some worrying trends when grades are compared state by state…
USE OUR TOOL BELOW, CREATED IN COLLABORATION WITH LEAPFROG HEALTH, TO FIND YOUR LOCAL HOSPITAL:
The research showed that Florida has some of the worst-rated hospitals in the country, with three awarded the dreaded ‘F’ ratings
What the data shows
To produce the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade report, the experts looked at 22 measures of patient safety – including the amount of infections, patient-doctor communication, surgery errors and cleanliness – and rated each one accordingly.
In some cases, when a hospital’s information was not available for a certain measure, Leapfrog contacted the organizations for more information or analyzed external reports.
Due to the limited availability of public data Leapfrog – which releases safety reports twice a year – was not able to calculate a safety grade for every hospital in the US.
Institutions with restricted public data include long-term care and rehabilitation facilities, mental health facilities and some specialty hospitals, such as surgery centers and cancer hospitals.
The worst rankings
A total of 14 out the 3,000 hospitals ranked were graded ‘F’ in the report.
The research showed that Florida has some of the worst-rated hospitals in the country, with three awarded the dreaded ‘F’ ratings.
These were Delray Medical Center, the Good Samaritan Medical Center, and Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, which together treat more than 450,000 patients each year.
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center has been involved in several medical care scandals, including its doctors allegedly falsifying medical records and being sued over misdiagnoses.
Michigan was the only other state with multiple hospitals slapped with ‘F’ ratings.
These included MC Detroit Receiving Hospital and DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital, which treat a combined number of 200,000 patients annually.
In Michigan, DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital is currently embroiled in a multi-million dollar lawsuit over claims of negligence, which allegedly led to two patients being raped, and another committing suicide inside a room.
One hospital to make headlines last year was SSM Health DePaul Hospital, with more than 30 patients alleging sexual abuse
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center in Florida has been involved in several medical care blunders, including a doctor misdiagnosing a fatal heart problem
Former staff members have said that severe understaffing had allowed the hospital turn into a crime scene.
One of the most shocking cases alleged in the lawsuit involved a male patient who raped a female psychiatric patient receiving in-patient care while restrained in bed.
Elsewhere, scandal-hit SSM Health DePaul Hospital in Missouri was also given an F rating.
Last year more than 30 patients alleged sexual abuse, including some as young as five years old.
Other US hospitals to receive F rankings included the Regional West Medical Center in Nebraska, Berkeley Medical Center in West Virginia, Rivers Health in West Virginia, HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital in Illinois, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center in Kansas, Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in California and Howard University Hospital in Washington DC.
Daily Mail has approached the hospitals that received poor scores for comment.
The best hospitals
The state with the highest percentage of A grade hospitals was Utah, with just over 60 percent of its care facilities getting top marks.
Some of the state’s top ranking hospitals included Lone Peak, Lakeview, Intermountain Spanish Fork and Holy Cross.
These health centers scored highly in many areas, with an effective leadership said to be one of the main factors in lowering the number of harmful events and increasing all-round efficiency.
In at second place, Virginia saw 58 percent of its hospitals get A grades. It was followed by Connecticut (50 percent), North Carolina (46.7 percent), and New Jersey (46.3 percent).
California ranked in the top 10 for the first time since fall 2014, coming in at sixth place in the state rankings with 44.9 percent of its hospitals getting A grades.
Rounding out the top ten were Rhode Island (44.4 percent), Idaho (42.9 percent), and Pennsylvania (41.2 percent), while Colorado and South Carolina tied at tenth place with 40.4 percent scores.
Iowa, North and South Dakota and Vermont did not have any hospitals with an A grades.
The Joint Commission is a US-based organization that provides accreditation and reports on incidence data from international hospitals. Their annual report deems never events as ‘sentinel events’ because: ‘they signal the need for immediate investigation and response’
Making improvements
The analysts said the latest grades showed hospitals are ‘making progress in patient safety across several performance measures including notable improvements in healthcare associated infections, hand hygiene and medication safety’.
But they added that there are still far too many disparities and ‘we haven’t yet achieved consistent improvements across all areas of safety’.
Leapfrog representative, Ms Stewart, said the data showed that ‘many hospitals with poor grades show a strong commitment to improvement and often enhance patient safety quickly’.
‘We have seen hospitals go from an ‘F’ Grade all the way to an ‘A’ through an unrelenting focus on putting patients first,’ she added.
More than 20 hospitals that received C ratings in Leapfrog’s spring 2024 report saw these bumped up to A grades come fall.
However, more than 50,000 lives could be saved every year if F, D, C, and B grades could improve their patient safety record to that achieved by A grade hospitals.
A 2024 report led by researchers from Michigan State University highlighted that 400,000 hospitalized patients experienced some preventable harm each year.
Medical errors can also have a high cost, with some experts estimating that adverse events cost the healthcare system $20 billion each year.
Others approximate healthcare costs of $35.7 billion to $45 billion annually for hospital-acquired infections alone.
Commenting further on the findings, Leapfrog Group’s CEO, Leah Binder, said: ‘Preventable deaths and harm in hospitals have been a major policy concern for decades.
‘So, it is good news that Leapfrog’s latest safety grades reveal that hospitals across the country are making notable gains in patient safety, saving countless lives.
‘Next, we need hospitals to accelerate this progress – because no one should have to die from a preventable error in a hospital.’
The most common blunders
More than 200,000 people die every year from preventable hospital errors, injuries, accidents, and infections, the equivalent of around 550 per day.
In the Leapfrog report, medication errors were shown to be the most common type of blunder.
Research suggested the average hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, and an estimated 40 percent of errors occur in handoffs during the admission, transfer and discharge of patients.
Company spokesperson Ms Stewart said: ‘We are still not where we need to be as a country, and too many lives are lost to preventable errors.’
She encouraged patients to consult the grades when seeking care, as ‘all hospitals are not the same’ when it comes to standards.
An adverse events report from the Joint Commission – a US-based not-for-profit organization that analyzes hospital and healthcare data from across the world – recently revealed a range of blunders from hospitals across the US.
It has been releasing data about these events since at least 2013.
The report from 2023 (the most recent available) found there were 110 patients who had foreign objects left in their body – an 11 percent increase from 2022.
Of the objects mistakenly left behind, 35 percent were sponges, 10 percent were guide wires and eight percent were fragments of medical instruments.
The remaining 47 percent was a miscellaneous mixture of other tools – with one case reporting surgical scissors left in the body.
After foreign objects, there were 106 cases of assault, rape, sexual assault or homicides involving hospitalized patients in America in 2023, according to the report.
Half of these were patient-on-patient, 28 percent involved staff-on-patient and 13 percent involved a patient acting on a staff member.
Finally, there were 81 cases where patients had treatment delayed unnecessarily and 71 cases where patients committed suicide while at the hospital.
The Joint Commission’s hospital patient safety goals for 2025 include improving patient identification to ensure they get the correct medicine and treatment, encouraging more staff to adhere to hand cleaning guidelines and taking greater care in surgery to avoid potentially fatal mistakes.
