New CA Hospital Safety Ratings: 93 Get 'A' Rating, 3 Get 'F' Grade

CALIFORNIA — Ninety-three hospitals in the Golden State 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.

In California, hospitals receiving the top letter grade were:

• Mills-Peninsula Medical Center - Burlingame
• Mercy General Hospital - Sacramento
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Roseville
• Paradise Valley Hospital - National City
• UC San Diego Health Hillcrest - Hillcrest Medical Center - San Diego
• Sharp Grossmont Hospital - La Mesa
• UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion - San Francisco
• Bakersfield Memorial Hospital - Bakersfield
• St. Elizabeth Community Hospital - Red Bluff
• San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital - Banning
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - South San Francisco
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Santa Clara
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Oakland
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - San Francisco
• UC San Diego Health La Jolla - Jacobs Medical Center and Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center
• St. John's Regional Medical Center of Oxnard - Oxnard
• St. Joseph's Medical Center of Stockton - Stockton
• Parkview Community Hospital Medical Center - Riverside
• Adventist Health White Memorial - Los Angeles
• Marian Regional Medical Center - Santa Maria
• Northridge Hospital Medical Center-Roscoe Boulevard Campus - Northridge
• Adventist Health Hanford - Hanford
• Regional Medical Center of San Jose - San Jose
• Valley Presbyterian Hospital - Van Nuys
• Woodland Memorial Hospital - Woodland
• Dignity Health St. Bernardine Medical Center - San Bernadino
• Novato Community Hospital - Novato
• Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center - Downey
• Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center - Fontana
• Kaiser Permanente Orange County-Irvine Medical Center - Irvine
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Modesto
• Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital - Grass Valley
• El Camino Hospital Los Gatos - Los Gatos
• Sequoia Hospital - Redwood City
• Palmdale Regional Medical Center - Palmdale
• Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center - Chula Vista
• Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian - Newport Beach
• Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center - Pomona
• French Hospital Medical Center - San Luis Obispo
• Adventist Health Glendale - Glendale
• University of California Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center - Los Angeles
• Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital - Santa Rosa
• Mercy Hospital - Southwest - Bakersfield
• Adventist Health Ukiah Valley - Ukiah
• El Camino Hospital - Mountian View
• Loma Linda University Medical Center - Loma Linda
• Salinas Valley Health Medical Center - Salinas
• UCI Health - Orange
• Torrance Memorial Medical Center - Torrance
• NorthBay Medical Center - Fairfield
• Los Angeles General Medical Center - Los Angeles
• Kaiser Permanente Foundation Hospital South Bay - Harbor City
• Scripps Green Hospital - La Jolla
• West Anaheim Medical Center - Anaheim
• Stanford Health Care - Stanford
• Mercy Medical Center - Merced
• UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights - San Francisco
• Adventist Health Selma - Selma
• Scripps Memorial Hospital of Encinitas - Encinitas
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - San Rafael
• Kaiser Permanente Zion Medical Center - San Diego
• Mercy San Juan Medical Center - Carmichael
• Los Robles Health System - Los Robles Regional Medical Center -Thousand Oaks
• Eisenhower Medical Center - Rancho Mirage
• La Palma Intercommunity Hospital - La Palma
• Montclair Hospital Medical Center - Montclair
• Methodist Hospital of Sacramento - Sacramento
• Emanate Health Foothill Presbyterian Hospital - Glendora
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - San Jose
• Kaiser Permanente Orange County - Anaheim Medical Center
• St. John’s Hospital Camarillo - Camarillo
• Inland Valley Medical Center - Wildomar
• Twin Cities Community Hospital - Templeton
• Palomar Medical Center Poway - Poway
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - South Sacramento
• NorthBay VacaValley Hospital - Vacaville
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Santa Rosa
• Keck Hospital of USC - Los Angeles
• Rancho Springs Medical Center - Murrieta
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Fresno
• Greater El Monte Community Hospital - South El Monte
• Centinela Hospital Medical Center - Inglewood
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Manteca
• Kaiser Foundation Hospital - Antioch
• Shasta Regional Medical Center - Redding
• LOMA LINDA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER - MURRIETA
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital - Los Angeles
• UCSF Health - Mission Bay
• Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical Center - San Diego
• Hoag Hospital Irvine - Irvine
• Kaiser Permanente Ontario Medical Center - Ontario
• Loma Linda University Medical Center East Campus - Loma Linda

Overall, California had:

• 76 hospitals that earned “B” grades;
• 89 hospitals that earned “C” grades;
• 23 hospitals that earned “D” grades; and
• 3 hospitals that earned “F” grades.

The Leapfrog Group, which grades hospitals twice a year, also ranked the 10 states with the highest rate 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.

The area encompassing San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara ranked 10th among the top 25 and San Diego, Chula Vista and Carlsbad ranked 18th.

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.”