Peconic Bay Medical Center Earns 'A' In Patient Safety: Report

RIVERHEAD, NY — Peconic Bay Medical is one of 10 on Long Island given top safety grades in The Leapfrog Group’s spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades released Wednesday.

Peconic Bay Medical Center earned an "A" hospital safety grade from the Leapfrog Group, a national, independent nonprofit watchdog.

On Long Island, hospitals receiving the top letter grade of "A" were:

• Plainview Hospital, at 888 Old Country Road, Plainview
• South Shore University Hospital, at 301 E. Main St., Bay Shore
• Huntington Hospital, at 270 Park Ave., Huntington
• NYU Langone Hospital - Long Island, at 259 1st St., Mineola
• St. Francis Hospital & Heart Center, at 100 Port Washington Blvd., Roslyn
• Glen Cove Hospital, at 101 St. Andrews Lane, Glen Cove
• Mather Hospital, at 75 N. Country Road, Port Jefferson
• St. Charles Hospital, at 200 Belle Terre Road, Port Jefferson
• Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, at 240 Meeting House Lane, Southampton
• Peconic Bay Medical Center, at 1 Heroes Way, Riverhead

Long Island Hospitals earning "B" grades are:

• Syosset Hospital, at 221 Jericho Turnpike, Syosset
• St. Catherine of Siena Hospital, at 50 Route 25A, Smithtown
• Stony Brook University Hospital, at Health Science Center, SUNY Stony Brook
• Long Island Jewish Medical Center, at 270-05 76th Ave., New Hyde Park

Long Island Hospitals earning "C" grades are:

• St. Joseph Hospital, at 4295 Hempstead Turnpike, Bethpage
• North Shore University Hospital, at 300 Community Drive, Manhasset
• Mercy Hospital, at 1000 N. Village Ave., Rockville Centre
• Mt. Sinai South Nassau, at 1 Healthy Way, Oceanside
• Long Island Jewish Valley Stream, at 900 Franklin Ave., Valley Stream
• Long Island Community Health Hospital at NYU Langone Health, at 101 Hospital Road, Patchogue
• Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital, at 201 Manor Place, Greenport

Long Island hospitals earning "D" grades are:

• Nassau University Medical Center, at 2201 Hempstead Turnpike, East Meadow
• Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, at 1000 Montauk Highway, West Islip

Zero Long Island hospitals earned an “F” grade.

The Leapfrog Group, which grades hospitals twice a year, also ranked the 10 states with the highest number of “A” hospitals. Utah tops the list, followed by Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Alaska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, respectively.For the first time this spring, the watchdog ranked the top 25 metropolitan statistical reporting areas according to the number of “A” hospitals. The top three metro areas are Allentown, Pennsylvania; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Nationwide, hospitals showed improvements over their fall 2023 performance in both reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient experiences, the report said.

Hospital-acquired infections and preventable errors kill about 250,000 people a year in the United States, making patient safety problems the nation’s third-leading cause of death, according to a summary of peer-reviewed research published in the global health care journal BMJ.

Hospital-acquired infections soared to levels not seen since 2016. Since that spike, 92 percent of hospitals showed improved performance on at least one of three dangerous infections, the report said.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections were down by 34 percent, and both catheter-associated urinary tract infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections decreased by 30 percent.

Despite the improvements, “patient safety remains a crisis-level hazard in health care,” Leapfrog Group president and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

“Some hospitals are much better than others at protecting patients from harm, and that’s why we make the Hospital Safety Grade available to the public and why we encourage all hospitals to focus more attention on safety,” Binder said.

Patient experiences have worsened since the pandemic, and while the spring report shows improvement, patients don’t report the same level of confidence they had before the pandemic, according to the report.

Patient experience is measured through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to publicly report how hospital patients measure the care they received.

The five measures are nurse communication, doctor communication, hospital staff responsiveness, communication about medicines and discharge information.

“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” Binder said. “We were also pleased to see the decrease in preventable infections, which cause terrible suffering and sometimes death. When we look at these positive trends, we see lives saved — and that is gratifying.”