By Kim Van Sickel

VCU Health Tappahannock Hospital has once again received an “A” grade, the highest possible ranking, from The Leapfrog Group’s spring 2024 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade. This national designation highlights a hospital’s efforts to protect patients from preventable harm. In addition, Tappahannock Hospital was recognized by the Health Transformation Alliance, made up of the Leapfrog Group and Turquoise Health, among 472 hospitals across 42 states to receive both Leapfrog’s highest safety rating and the highest price transparency score from Turquoise Health.

The Leapfrog Group is a national nonprofit organization committed to improving health care quality and safety. It assigns safety grades to participating hospitals across the nation twice annually in the spring and fall. It is the only hospital ratings program based exclusively on a hospital’s efforts to prevent medical errors, injuries, accidents, infections and other harms to patients in their care.

“It is our unwavering commitment to keep patients safe,” said Liz Martin, president of Tappahannock Hospital. “As an organization, we are diligent about making continuous improvements and empowering everyone on the team to take responsibility for patient safety.”

Clinical components that affect the Leapfrog score include medication safety, ICU physician staffing, adhering to patient safety practices and evaluating nurse staffing. Tappahannock Hospital has excellent outcomes because of a well-established process to identify and mitigate potential safety issues and thorough infection prevention standards in place. Each care team plans ahead to establish appropriate staffing – ensuring nurses have manageable workloads and critical care physicians have coverage.

Some of its most notable accomplishments include having zero reportable hospital acquired infections (HAIs) for over a full year. In addition, the hospital recently received Stroke Ready Certification from DNV, validating team members’ ability to recognize and treat stroke symptoms quickly and appropriately, as well as get patients needing intervention to a higher level of care expeditiously.

Tappahannock Hospital employees report and learn from near-miss events and every member of the care team is encouraged to speak up if they have concerns. The hospital also has several programs, technologies and systems in place to catch and address concerns early.

“From proper PPE to patient information verification to technologies designed to keep patients safe, our teams stay hyper-focused on behaviors that are designed to help us deliver consistent, reliable care,” Martin said. “That extends to our communication with each other and involving the patient and their loved ones in the care experience. Everyone has a vital role to play in keeping patients safe.”

Developed under the guidance of a national expert panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses up to 27 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to nearly 3,000 general hospitals nationwide.

The Hospital Safety Grade’s methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public. To see VCU Health Tappahannock Hospital’s full grade details and access patient tips for staying safe in the hospital, visit hospitalsafetygrade.org.

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