New Hudson Valley Hospital Safety Ratings For 2024: See Best, Worst

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — Two hospitals in the Hudson Valley 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 the Hudson Valley, the hospitals receiving the top letter grade were:

• Northern Westchester Hospital, Mount Kisco
• White Plains Hospital, White Plains

Both received “A” grades in the fall of 2023.

Other Hudson Valley hospitals that were ranked for Spring 2024, compared to their grade for Fall 2023, are:

• Northern Dutchess Hospital, Rhinebeck: Spring 2024 — B; Fall 2023 — B
• NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester, Bronxville: Spring 2024 — B; Fall 2023 — C
• St. Anthony Community Hospital, Warwick: Spring 2024 — B; Fall 2023 — B
• Phelps Hospital, Sleepy Hollow: Spring 2024 — B; Fall 2023 — B
• Garnet Health Medical Center, Middletown: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• St. Joseph's Medical Center of Yonkers, Yonkers: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Poughkeepsie: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Montefiore Nyack Hospital, Nyack: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Bon Secours Community Hospital, Port Jervis: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Good Samaritan Hospital, Suffern: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital, New Rochelle: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — D
• St. John's Riverside Hospital - Andrus Pavilion, Yonkers: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Montefiore St. Luke's Cornwall, Newburgh: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• HealthAlliance Hospital Mary's Avenue Campus, Kingston: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — NA
• New York-Presbyterian Hudson Valley Hospital, Cortlandt Manor: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Putnam Hospital, Carmel: Spring 2024 — C; Fall 2023 — C
• Columbia Memorial Hospital, Hudson: Spring 2024 — D; Fall 2023 — F
• MidHudson Regional Hospital of Westchester Medical Center, Poughkeepsie: Spring 2024 — D; Fall 2023 — D
• Westchester Medical Center, Valhalla: Spring 2024 — D; Fall 2023 — D

No Hudson Valley hospitals received an “F” grade for Spring 2024.

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

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. 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 receive.

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.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, Northern Westchester Hospital was incorrectly said to be in Mount Vernon. It is located in Mount Kisco. Patch regrets the error.