Twelve Consecutive 'A' Grades for Patient Safety

Catawba Valley Medical Center (CVMC) has received an ‘A’ Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade for Spring 2022. This national distinction recognizes CVMC’s achievements in protecting patients from preventable harm and error in the hospital, as well as meeting the highest safety standards in the United States. This marks the twelfth consecutive ‘A’ grade for safety that CVMC has received dating back to Fall 2016.

The Leapfrog Group, an independent national watchdog organization, assigns an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” or “F” grade to general hospitals across the country based on over 30 national performance measures reflecting errors, injuries, accidents and infections, as well as systems hospitals have in place to prevent harm.

Eddie Beard, President and CEO of Catawba Valley Health System, said, “Patients, above all else, want to feel safe in a hospital. We have exceptional staff and protocols in place to ensure that patient safety remains our very top priority every day. It’s a great testament to the women and men of our organization to earn this distinction even as we continued to fight through the pandemic. And it’s an honor to show our community that we will not compromise on this commitment.”

“An ‘A’ Safety Grade is an outstanding achievement, and one that is not possible without a 24/7 effort by the entire workforce at Catawba Valley Medical Center to protect patients from harm,” said Leah Binder, President and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. “This community should be proud.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the only hospital ratings program based exclusively on hospital prevention of medical errors and harms to patients. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses up to 27 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,700 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year. The Hospital Safety Grade’s methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public at HospitalSafetyGrade.org.

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