Despite hospital-acquired infections shooting up as much as 60% nationally during the pandemic, local facilities have managed to maintain safety standards, according to a consumer watchdog organization.
Good Samaritan Hospital of San Jose jumped from years of getting a “C” grade, to joining El Camino’s facilities in Mountain View and Los Gatos, which once again both made the “A” grade.
This performance, revealed in a survey released May 3 by The Leapfrog Group, an independent nonprofit focused on health industry transparency, came despite CLABSI bloodstream infections rising 44% in Californian health care institutions—from 2021 to 2023—and MRSA transmissions jumping by one-third across the state during the same period.
“This safety grade is a testament to the collaborative efforts of our nurses, physicians and all the team members at both our hospitals,” El Camino Health CEO Dan Woods said in a release. “Safety and quality are at the heart of everything we do.”
The review probed a wide range of areas, from infection rates to surgery complications to preventable errors to staffing rosters, providing context behind the quarter of patients who, according to a January New England Journal of Medicine study, may leave hospitals with some sort of injury or sickness.
kaiser’s Santa Clara facility maintained an ‘A’ Grade, while its San Jose Location dropped to a ‘B’
The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade relies on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data as well as volunteer surveys completed by health care facility officials, in a bid to help patients steer clear of places they’ll be more likely to get bedsores, break a hip in a fall, or end up with gas bubbles in their blood.
The Spring 2023 results provide a lens into how hospitals weathered the onslaught of novel coronavirus cases, as the data was collected during 2022.
It compares outcomes to the Fall 2022 report, which used information collected pertaining to the 2020 year—representing the year the Covid-19 began to tear through America.
The survey did not show an increase in pathogens being passed on during surgery and suggested a slight decrease in people becoming infected with C. difficile while in the hospital.
Santa Clara Valley Medical Center once again got a “C” grade, although it didn’t dip back down to the “F” it earned for Spring 2020 or even the “D” it got in Spring 2022.
O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, a 358-bed acute care facility, also ended up with another “C,” the same score it got last fall.
The Kaiser Foundation hospital in Santa Clara maintained its “A”-level performance—a streak since before the pandemic—however its San Jose location dropped, this time, from an “A” to a “B.”
Meanwhile, Regional Medical Center of San Jose didn’t manage to improve upon the “B” it received in Fall 2022, however, that was still better than the “C” grade it went into the pandemic with.
