Source: NJ.com
The Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health, as well as the three Hudson County hospitals operated by CarePoint Health — Bayonne Medical Center, Hoboken University Medical Center, and Christ Hospital in Jersey City — all received A’s in patient safety in a recent study by the nonprofit>.
But the Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in Secaucus and Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen both received C’s in the category that measures medical errors, and precautions taken to avoid infections, injuries and accidents.
A spokesman for Palisades, which is part of the Hackensack Medical Center Network, said the study is based on old information. The 2014 report “is based on data from 2013 and it is not reflective of the work we are doing now,” the spokesman said. “These measures of our performance have significantly improved for 2014.”
A spokesman for Meadowlands said the hospital will do better next year. “We take patient safety very seriously here at Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center.” he said. “Scoring an ‘A’ for two consecutive sessions is a clear indication of that. We are disappointed and very unhappy about seeing ‘C’ near our name, but we firmly believe we will see ‘A’ again next to our name next April.”
The hospitals that fared well in the study embraced the findings.
“We are extremely proud that all three hospitals in our system have achieved an ‘A’ grade,” CarePoint Health CEO Dennis Kelly said. “The CarePoint Health system takes great pride in providing excellence in health care and this score shows that as a system, we are committed to patient safety.”
Jersey City Medical Center–Barnabas Health CEO Joseph Scott said its becoming “increasingly obvious to most patients and their families that not all hospitals are equal — which is why more and more consumers are paying close attention to these scores in making their choices,” Scott said. “We’re extremely proud to be receiving an ‘A’ score for the sixth consecutive time, a record that very few hospitals in New Jersey or around the country can point to.”
Developed under the guidance of Leapfrog’s Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce scores from A to F, representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm, according to The Leapfrong Group.
New Jersey now ranks fourth nationwide in the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Score with 52 percent of its acute care, general hospitals receiving an A grade.