Maine hospitals overall rank in the top 10 in the U.S. for safety, according to the latest hospital safety grades from the Leapfrog Group. But some individual hospitals, like Franklin Memorial in Farmington, did see a drop in grade level.
The Leapfrog Group’s Jillian West says Franklin Memorial dropped from an A grade, which it has scored since fall 2013, to a C grade because of an incident in which a foreign object was mistakenly left in a patient after surgery.
“Most hospitals have a rate of zero, and that’s something we would expect, is that is something that would never happen,” she says.
West says Franklin Memorial scored well on other safety measures. She says patients should use the hospital grades to ask hospital staff what protocols are in place to ensure patient safety.
Maine hospitals scored No. 3 in the U.S. for safety.
