Rush Copley, Ascension Mercy Get 'A' In New Hospital Safety Grades

AURORA, IL — Two Aurora hospitals have made improvements in protecting patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries and infections, according to the Fall 2022 Hospital Safety Grades report released Wednesday.

Rush Copley Medical Center, at 2000 Ogden Ave., and Ascension Medical, at 1325 N. Highland Ave., both received "A" grades from The Leapfrog Group, an independent nonprofit healthcare watchdog group. No other Aurora hospitals were rated this fall.

The group used an academic grading scale with five letter grades to score nearly 3,000 hospitals nationwide on more than 30 measures of patient safety. Leapfrog says its hospital rating system is the only one in the country focusing solely on a hospital’s ability to protect patients from preventable errors.

In Illinois, 26 hospitals received an A, 24 hospitals received a B, 45 hospitals received a C and seven hospitals received a D grade. One hospital received an F.

With the release of its fall report, The Leapfrog Group has analyzed hospital safety data for a decade. Most hospitals have improved over time under more public scrutiny, Leapfrog Group President and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

Notably, hospitals reduced what are called "never events" — accidents and errors that never should have happened, the release said. Incidents of falls and trauma and incidents in which objects were unintentionally left in a patient’s body during surgery were down 25 percent, the watchdog group said.

"For a long time, the healthcare community tried to improve safety, but progress stalled," Binder said. "The big difference over this decade is that for the first time, we publicly reported each hospital's record on patient safety, and that galvanized the kind of change we all hoped for."

She added: "It's not enough change, but we are on the right track."