Consumer Reports, a long-time independent product and services standards advocate, rates hospitals for safety based on the most current data available. Unfortunately, not every hospital is covered, and the Consumer Reports service cites the same sketchy lack of information on its inability to reach more than 18 percent of the nation’s hospitals for evaluation.
Still, the service annually rates more than 1,100 facilities, providing a way to comparison shop within the relative confines of your needs and location.
Six Categories of Care
The Consumer Reports hospital findings focused on six categories: readmissions, infections, communication, complications, CT scanning and mortality. They also interviewed patients, physicians, safety experts and hospital administration to provide an overview of some of the more common occurrences in a hospital.
What they discovered is somewhat disturbing. All hospitals have some safety issues, Consumer Reports discovered, but bad hospitals have a lot of them. Even hospitals at the top of the list scored just 72 on a 100-point scale of safety, and some of the nation’s big names in hospitals – Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic, scored less than 50 on the safety scale.
Consumer Reports also mentioned that one in 20 hospitalized people will develop an infection, many of which can lead to life-threatening issues. These are usually caused by improperly sterilized needles and catheters, contaminated doctors, nurses or other workers, and dirty instruments or conditions.
Worse, about 290,000 surgical-site infections happen each year. These are particularly deadly, killing more than 16,000 patients per year. The sad news is that most of them are preventable, and of the 1,100 hospitals surveyed by Consumer Reports, fewer than 150 reported zero infections.