Lee Health hospitals earn top grades for safety

From Dr. Larry Antonucci, president and chief executive officer of Lee Health

At Lee Health, providing our community with high-quality care is what we strive for every day.

I’m proud to announce that Leapfrog Group released its Spring 2022 Hospital Safety Grades and awarded HealthPark Medical Center with an “A” grade for the sixth straight reporting period, and advanced Gulf Coast Medical Center to an “A” from the last reporting period.

Lee Memorial Hospital retained its “B” grade but increased its numeric score from the last reporting period, and Cape Coral Hospital retained its “B” grade.

These grades speak to the safe, high-quality care patients can expect to receive in our hospitals.

The Safety Grade assigns letter grades of “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” and “F” to hospitals across the country based on their performance in preventing medical errors, infections, and other harms. Every Lee Health hospital earned a raw score over 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, and the hospitals that earned a “B” grade were within only 6 percent of the 3.202 threshold of earning an “A” grade.

Developed under the guidance of a national expert panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 22 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,700 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year. The Leapfrog Group’s grading system is peer-reviewed, fully transparent, and free to the public.

Children’s hospitals are not included in The Leapfrog Group’s Spring grades, but Golisano Children’s Hospital has been named as a Top Children’s Hospital by The Leapfrog Group four times.

I want to thank the entire Lee Health team for continuing to provide the safest and highest quality of care to the patients we serve. Every day, I am proud of the incredible work our team does.

To learn more about Leapfrog’s Spring 2022 Hospital Safety Grades, please visit http://www.hospitalsafetygrade.org/.