New Springfield-area hospital grades released: Two get C's, two get D's
A national nonprofit watchdog organization has released their bi-annual hospital report card and certain Springfield hospitals received a barely passing grade.
As a parent, would you be upset to see your child’s report card filled with C’s and D’s? That's the grade Springfield hospitals were rated on safety, quality, and resource use from The Leapfrog Group.
Who is the Leapfrog Group?
The national nonprofit organization was founded in 2000 and annually collects hospital data. The organization analyzes and publishes the data as a resource for the public.
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What kind of data is collected?
The Leapfrog Group holds two data collections annually – a voluntary survey for hospitals to report quality and safety and the Hospital Safety Grade, which assigns letter grades to hospitals no matter if they voluntarily interact with the survey mentioned prior or not.
How the grading works
The data of hospitals comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and is graded upon 27 different measures including rates of preventable errors, injuries and infections and whether hospitals have systems in place to prevent them. The grades are given a letter of “A” for stellar, to “F” for failing and are updated twice yearly in the fall and spring.
How did the Springfield area do?
The report lists four hospitals in the area: Springfield Memorial Hospital, HSHS St. John's Hospital, Decatur Memorial Hospital and HSHS St. Mary's Hospital in Decatur. Here are how they were graded:
Springfield Memorial Hospital: D
Decatur Memorial Hospital: C
HSHS St. Mary's Hospital Decatur: D
HSHS St. John's Hospital: C
Why did HSHS St. John's receive a C?
According to the Leapfrog Group, the hospital fared well in staffing and practicing preventing errors but received worse than average grades on safety problems in five out of seven measures.
The five measures HSHS St. John’s underperformed in were harmful patient events following surgery, dangerous bed sores, patient falls, collapsed lungs after surgery and dangerous blood clots.
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How do these grades compare to previous years?
HSHS St. John's Hospital has seen a shift in grades since the coronavirus pandemic; the hospital received an A grade in the spring of 2021 and a B in the fall of 2021. Since 2022 however, every single report has given the hospital a C grade.
Springfield Memorial Hospital is also starting to straggle on grades. Since Spring of 2021, the hospital has always gotten a C on the bi-annual report. This is the first time Memorial has received a D grade in three years.
Both hospitals declined to provide information to The Leapfrog group and the public.
Some hospitals are excluded from the grading
While four area hospitals received a grade; notably, Springfield Clinic is not one of them. Some hospitals are excluded from the report because the information isn’t there yet. Critical access hospitals, children and cancer hospitals, government hospitals, long term care facilities and hospitals where the amount of data needed to be collected was not possible for measures to appear on this safety grade.
Claire Grant writes about business, growth and development and other news topics for the State Journal-Register. She can be reached at CLGrant@gannett.com; and on X (Formerly known as Twitter): @Claire_Granted
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Springfield-area hospitals receive C's and D's for patient care, safety
