FORT SCOTT, Kan. (November 1, 2017) – Fall report cards are in and Mercy Hospital Fort Scott earned a grade A for keeping patients safe.

The Leapfrog Group just released its fall 2017 Hospital Safety Grades, which score hospitals on how safe they keep their patients from errors, injuries, accidents, and infections. More than 2,600 U.S. general acute-care hospitals were assigned scores and only 832 received an A (32 percent of those surveyed).

“Providing safe care for our community is a high priority for the co-workers at Mercy Hospital Fort Scott,” said President Reta Baker. “The attention to careful hand washing and processes compliance has led our facility into its second year of having a zero percent C-Difficile (C-diff) infection rate. C-diff is an infection often associated with hospital stays. Use of the bar-coding system for medication administration has facilitated a remarkably low error rate.”

“Additionally, the electronic health record has been key to accurate and clear communication across the continuum of care resulting in excellent quality outcomes for our patients. Full credit for our Leapfrog ‘A’ rating goes to the physicians and co-workers who have any part in providing care to our patients.”

“We’re always focused on providing the highest quality care to our patients,” said Dr. Keith Starke, Mercy chief quality officer. “The work done by our co-workers to earn top grades for quality is critical to our patients and noticed by organizations such as Leapfrog that rank hospitals across the country.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is calculated by top patient safety experts, peer-reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public. It is updated every six months, once in the fall and once in the spring.

Using 30 evidence-based measures of patient safety, The Leapfrog Group calculated a numerical score for all eligible hospitals in the U.S. The numerical score was then converted into one of five letter grades: A, B, C, D or F. Read more about Leapfrog scoring here.