Long Island hospitals ranked for patient safety: 7 get 'A'

Seven Long Island hospitals received the top “A” rating Monday from a nonprofit that measures how well hospitals protect patient safety.

There were only a few changes in letter grades among 23 Long Island hospitals since the last time hospitals nationwide were rated in May by the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

St. Francis Hospital & Heart Center in Flower Hill has received an “A” score all but two times since the twice-a-year Leapfrog rating system debuted in 2012 — the most of any Long Island hospital.

Nassau University Medical Center, a public hospital in East Meadow, continued a streak of 11 ratings of “D,” the second-lowest rating. Only about 7% of hospitals nationwide received a “D.” Fewer than 1% received an “F,” none on Long Island, according to Leapfrog. As recently as fall 2015, NUMC received an A.

Dr. Anthony Boutin, president and CEO of Nassau Health Care Corporation, which runs NUMC, said in a statement, “Leapfrog's analysis and letter scoring system can be very misleading and does not effectively reflect a wide range of improvements at the facility that benefit our patients every day. We are constantly improving and modernizing our processes to ensure we deliver safe, high quality services to our patient population.”

Leah Binder, the president and CEO of Leapfrog, said obtaining and maintaining an “A” is “difficult. You have to make sure that every clinician and every staff person in the hospital pays attention to every rule every minute of every day without exception. They have to wash their hands every time they touch a patient. They have to double-check and double-check every medication order.”

St. Francis’ president, Dr. Charles Lucore, said he leads a daily safety meeting of hospital leadership.

“Every day we review good catches by team members,” he said, and “when there is a safety event or near safety event … we go through an analysis to determine whether it was related to an individual’s actions, and then they’re counseled, or whether it’s a systemic issue, and then we decide how to change the care environment to prevent a [near safety event] or a safety event in the future.”

In addition to St. Francis, the following Island hospitals received “A” ratings: Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson, NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island in Mineola, Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore and Syosset Hospital.

Dr. Robert Grossman, chief executive officer of NYU Langone Health, said in a statement, “These consistent ‘A’ ratings from Leapfrog are another independent validation of the safe, quality care we offer to patients across our system.”

Dr. Peter Silver, chief quality officer for Northwell Health, the region’s largest health system, which owns four of the seven hospitals, said Northwell is “constantly evaluating and reevaluating everything that we do” to improve patient care.

Two Northwell hospitals, Huntington Hospital and Manhasset’s North Shore University Hospital, dropped from “A” to “B.”

Silver said each hospital rating system focuses on different measurements and “are a little quirky” in what they emphasize. There was no drop in quality or safety at either hospital, he said. Silver pointed to how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in July gave Huntington and North Shore its highest rating, and U.S. News & World Report in August named North Shore one of the state’s four best institutions.

Leapfrog found that after more problems nationwide with three types of in-hospital infections during COVID-19, most hospitals have improved, reflecting less “chaos of crisis” from the pandemic and a concerted effort to reverse the increases, Binder said.

But “patient experience” scores have declined significantly since fall 2021, and New York had among the nation’s largest drops in “nurse communication” and “staff responsiveness.” Binder said one reason for that may be shortages of nurses and other clinical staff.

Studies show that communication with patients has an effect on safety, she said.

“It is common sense that if patients feel like they could communicate well with their nurses and with their doctors, and patients feel like they understood their medications, that they would be better protected from some of the errors and accidents that happened too often in hospitals,” she said.

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.