Hospital is ranked no. 1 in safety
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital received a perfect score on a national survey of 27 patient-safety practices.
The results place Packard Hospital ahead of the 26 other children’s hospitals that participated in the study.
“This score tells us that we’re on the right track toward effectively improving and ensuring patient safety,” said Paul Sharek, MD, MPH, the hospital’s chief clinical patient safety officer and medical director of quality management.
Many hospitals, including Packard, instituted new patient safety initiatives after the national Institute of Medicine reported in 1999 that 98,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors in hospitals.
In response to that report, an association of large employers called the Leapfrog Group started surveying hospitals to determine which facilities had instituted certain safety measures.
The survey has grown to cover more safety procedures and more hospitals each year, with 858 participating in 2004. It now provides information in an online format that allows health-care consumers to compare hospitals the way readers of Consumer Reports compare cars.
The 2004 report added a “quality index” that includes 27 safety criteria derived from a report on safe practices in health-care published in 2003 by the National Quality Forum. It was this index on which Packard Children’s Hospital ranked first among all children’s hospitals that submitted responses.