Health & Fitness
New WI Hospital Safety Ratings For 2024: See Best, Worst
Several hospitals in Wisconsin were given top safety grades in The Leapfrog Group's spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades released Wednesday.
![Nationwide, hospitals showed improvements over their fall 2023 performance in both reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient experiences, the report said.](https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/22887410/20240501/122742/styles/patch_image/public/202110-ped-ascension-urgent-care-wi-anderson___01122645394.jpg)
WISCONSIN — Several hospitals in Wisconsin were given top safety grades in The Leapfrog Group’s spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades released Wednesday.
The independent, nonprofit watchdog group assigned safety grades, ranging from “A” to “F,” for 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents and infections.
Wisconsin hospitals were graded as follows:
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"A" grade
- Aurora Medical Center Grafton
- Aurora Medical Center of Washington County
- Bellin Memorial Hospital
- Beloit Memorial Hospital
- HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital
- Mayo Clinic Health System-Eau Claire
- Mayo Clinic Health System-La Crosse
- Monroe Clinic Hospital
- ProHealth Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital
"B" grade
- Ascension NE Wisconsin - Mercy Campus
- Ascension NE Wisconsin - St Elizabeth Campus
- Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital - Elmbrook Campus
- Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital - St. Joseph Campus
- Aspirus Riverview Hospital
- Aspirus Wausau Hospital
- Aurora Medical Center Manitowoc County
- Aurora Medical Center of Kenosha
- Aurora Medical Center of Oshkosh
- Aurora Medical Center Sheboygan County
- Aurora Medical Center Summit
- Froedtert Hospital
- Froedtert Menomonee Falls Hospital
- Howard Young Medical Center
- HSHS St. Nicholas Hospital
- Marshfield Medical Center - Minocqua
- ProHealth Waukesha Memorial Hospital
- Sauk Prairie Hospital
- Watertown Regional Medical Center
"C" grade
- Ascension All Saints Hospital
- Ascension Columbia St Mary's Hospital Milwaukee
- Ascension Columbia St Mary's Hospital Ozaukee
- Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital - Franklin Campus
- Ascension St. Francis Hospital
- Aspirus Divine Savior Hospital
- Aspirus Rhinelander Hospital
- Aspirus Stevens Point Hospital
- Aurora BayCare Medical Center
- Aurora Lakeland Medical Center
- Aurora Medical Center Bay Area
- Aurora Medical Center Burlington
- Aurora Sinai Medical Center
- Aurora St Luke's Medical Center of Aurora Health Care Metro, Inc
- Aurora St. Luke's South Shore of Aurora Health Care Metro
- Aurora West Allis Medical Center
- Fort Memorial Hospital
- Froedtert Pleasant Prairie Hospital
- Froedtert West Bend Hospital
- Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center
- Holy Family Memorial Medical Center
- HSHS St Vincent Hospital
- HSHS St. Mary's Hospital of Green Bay
- Marshfield Medical Center - Eau Claire
- Marshfield Medical Center - Marshfield
- Marshfield Medical Center - Rice Lake
- Marshfield Medical Center - Weston
- Marshfield Medical Center Beaver Dam
- Mercyhealth Hospital and Trauma Center - Janesville
- SSM Health St. Agnes Hospital - Fond du Lac
- SSM Health St. Clare Hospital - Baraboo
- SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital - Janesville
- SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital - Madison
- ThedaCare Regional Medical Center - Appleton
- ThedaCare Regional Medical Center - Neenah
- UnityPoint Health - Meriter
- UW Health East Madison Hospital
- UW Health University Hospital
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.
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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 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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.”
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