Glendale Adventist gets an ‘A’ in hospital safety
A national hospital-safety organization released its latest results last week, and once again only one hospital in or around Glendale earned its highest mark.
Glendale Adventist Medical Center earned its fourth-straight A rating from the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Its Hospital Safety Grades are awarded twice a year based on the quality of patient safety.
Leapfrog’s assessments factor in a number of criteria from 30 categories, pooled together from various performance measures from sources such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These include rates of errors, injuries, accidents and infections.
Of the 2,633 hospitals evaluated, only 844 earned an A, 658 received a B, 954 earned a C, 157 got a D and 20 an F. According to Erica Mobley, Leapfrog’s director of communications, the data pulled from Medicare and other agencies can be several years old.
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Dr. Despina Kayichian, vice president of medical affairs and quality at Glendale Adventist, said a culture of safety is ingrained at the hospital and the close relationship between the hospital’s quality department and staff helped achieve the high marks.
“It’s essentially a lot of hard work from everyone involved in patient care,” Kayichian said. “Our physicians, nurses, support staff, entry service — we all came together and said we want to be delivering the best and safest care to our patients and find out what it takes to do that.”
Glendale Adventist Medical Center excelled in several categories including preventing infections, having practices in place to prevent errors and overall safety.
Both Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital and USC Verdugo Hills Hospital retained the C ratings they received on their reports cards this past spring.
In a statement, Liza Abcede, chief nurse executive at Glendale Memorial, said the hospital’s score by Leapfrog is not a complete picture of its quality of safety and added that Glendale Memorial has recently received several awards, including the Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award for the third year in a row, and the 2016 Patient Safety Excellence Award, which ranked Glendale Memorial among the top 10% of hospitals nationwide.
“The measures identified by the Leapfrog Group for improving quality and patient safety may help improve patient-safety outcomes, but they are neither the best nor the only indicators of an institution’s quality” Abcede said in the statement.
Leapfrog gave Glendale Memorial low marks for areas such as how well patients were informed by the hospital staff about the help they would need after discharge and the amount of time it took for hospital staff to respond to a patient’s requests for help.
For USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, its C rating was given, in part, for occurrences of urinary-tract infections during stays in the intensive-care unit as well as a lack of communication about patient discharge.
“We have recently implemented processes and improvements that have resulted in improved performance across a number of patient-safety indicators, details that are not reflected in this year’s Leapfrog score,” said the hospital in a statement. “We believe future scores will present a more accurate picture of our hospital’s quality and performance.”
Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank earned a D grade, a drop from the C earned this past spring and a B awarded in late 2015.
The hospital could not be reached for comment.
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Jeff Landa, jeff.landa@latimes.com
Twitter: @JeffLanda
