NSMC Salem Hospital Gets 'C' In Safety Grades

SALEM, MA — North Shore Medical Center's Salem Hospital received an C grade in hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group. While Salem Hospital was above average in safety grades for infections and surgery, it lagged behind national averages in practices to prevent errors, safety problems and staffing issues.

Laura H. Fleming, a spokesperson for NSMC, said the company has not participated in the Leapfrog survey for the past four years and that some data used to compile its grade of Salem Hospital was more than two years old. She said NSMC would be completing Leapfrog surveys going forward and expects the next report, which will be released in the spring, will more accurately reflect the hospital's safety standards.

"NSMC Salem Hospital provides extremely safe and compassionate care to patients and families on the North Shore and just a few months ago, received the 2019 HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award for providing excellence in patient safety by preventing infections, medical errors, and other preventable complications," she said.

The Leapfrog Group's rating system is focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group in the spring and in the fall.

Leapfrog said 34 percent of the hospitals surveyed received the C grade. Salem Hospital declined to report nursing levels, which dragged down its overall grade. It also declined to report on hand washing practices. The hospital also had higher rates of bedsores and patient falls than the national average.

See the full Salem Hospital safety report.

The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

"In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals," Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a news release. "It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process."

Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to "produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors." The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)