Some New York hospitals make so many medical mistakes that patients aren’t safe in them.
Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn earned a big fat F in the Spring 2015 Hospital Safety Scores. It was one of only 20 hospitals in the entire nation that flunked. Yet New York state just awarded Brookdale a whopping $68 million from a special fund to keep it open.
That deathtrap should be shut, not subsidized with your tax dollars.
Two other hospitals in our state also got F’s for safety: Cortland Regional Medical Center and Aurelia Osborn Fox Memorial in Oneonta. Four others got D’s. Patients at these hospitals are at significantly higher risk of getting infections, being given the wrong medication, falling, developing a bedsore or sustaining some other injury. No Connecticut or New Jersey hospitals got failing grades.
These Safety Scores (A, B, C, D or F) are compiled twice a year by the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit advocating for hospital safety.
Leapfrog determined that Brookdale patients are 10 times as likely to develop bedsores and twice as likely to get a urinary tract infection as patients nationwide.
A scary 13 percent of pneumonia patients at Brookdale get the wrong antibiotic, versus a 4 percent error rate in most hospitals, according to Medicare data. And about one-third of Brookdale patients with blood clots get the wrong treatment, a mistake made only 1 percent of the time nationwide.
Noting that Brookdale has garnered three F’s in a row, Leapfrog spokesperson Erica Mobley observes, “This is not a hospital that is placing a priority on patient safety. They have really poor outcomes.” Patients would be better off traveling the 15 minutes to Kings County Hospital, which got a C rating for safety.
That’s better than Brooklyn Hospital Center’s downtown campus, which got a D grade. Its patients contract a high number of bloodstream infections, urinary tract infections and a deadly form of diarrhea called Clostridium difficile, according to Medicare data. Flushing Hospital Medical Center, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Yonkers also got D’s.
Sadly, the state’s hospital associations would rather shoot the messenger than solve the problem. The Healthcare Association of New York State complains that hospital-rating systems such as Leapfrog, Consumer Reports, US News & World Report and others ignore the “complexity” of providing care. That’s baloney. There’s nothing complex about dying from a needless infection or the wrong medication. It shouldn’t happen.
The New York State Health Department puts hospitals’ infection rates up on a website, but it’s deliberately user-unfriendly. Visit the site seeking easily digestible information and you’ll instead find complicated graphs with mind-numbing disclaimers saying you shouldn’t use any of it to choose one hospital over another.
Three New York hospitals — New York Presbyterian, NYU Langone and Mount Sinai Hospital — win coveted places on US News & World Report’s National Honor Roll. The magazine says these hospitals are the best choices if you have “serious and complicated medical conditions.” For example, New York Presbyterian gets top marks for cardiology and heart surgery, nephrology, neurology, psychiatry and rheumatology. Mt. Sinai is second in the nation in geriatrics.
But expertise is not the same as safety. Even these renowned hospitals get only B’s or even an occasional C from Leapfrog. What a tragedy it would be to rescue a patient from severe heart damage or a rare cancer, only to lose him to an avoidable infection in the ICU.
Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, Virginia and New Jersey hospitals earn the most A’s for safety. “States like Maine and Massachusetts have a lot of strong voices” demanding improvement, says Leapfrog, adding: “Unfortunately, we have not seen that in New York.”
Amen. In New York, an unholy alliance of unions, trade associations and government officials make excuses for unsafe hospitals like Brookdale. Patients become the unwitting victims. They go to these hospitals trusting they will get safe care. And their trust is betrayed.
Betsy McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths at hospitalinfection.org.