The nonprofit Leapfrog Group released its hospital safety grades for the fall of 2022 and 12 Mississippi hospitals received an A rating.
Clarksdale’s Delta Health-Northwest Regional got a C and its parent hospital, Delta Health-The Medical Center, in Greenville got a B.
Financially strapped Greenwood Leflore Hospital got an A. Bolivar Medical Center in Cleveland and Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi in Oxford both got Bs.
The grade, which is assigned to about 3,000 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice a year, is based on how hospitals and other health care organizations protect their patients from errors, injuries, accidents and infections.
The score comes from hospitals’ performance on more than 30 national measures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and other data.
The state’s largest hospital and only academic medical center - University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson - scored a C for the fourth year in a row.
No Mississippi hospitals received an F grade, and only one hospital received a D: Merit Health Biloxi. Each grade is based on hospitals’ performance in five categories: infections, problems with surgery, safety problems, practices to prevent errors, and doctors, nurses and hospital staff.
“Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors,” its website states.
According to the group, 250,000 people die each year from preventable errors in hospitals.
