A Major Idaho Hospital Just Received a Disappointing ‘D’ Safety Grade

With people climbing ladders to hang lights and using things like large knives and fryers in the kitchen, it really shouldn’t surprise you that the number of emergency room visits spikes during the holidays. 

A study from the National Institute of Health says that ERs typically see a rise in the number of patients they see due to slips, falls, cuts and workplace accidents during the holidays. With people straying from their normal routines, be it your normal eating or sleep patterns, they see more issues with abdominal pain, diarrhea and food poisoning, too. There’s even a correlation between the holidays and some people needing extra care for psychiatric disorders and mental health issues. 

READ MORE: These Are The 10 Things Most Likely to Kill You in Idaho

While no one wants to make a trip to the hospital, if your or your family member ends up there, you definitely hope they end up at an Idaho hospital with a passing safety grade.  Unfortunately, it’s not easy to tell how a hospital is performing just by looking at it. That’s why The Leapfrog Group releases their “Hospital Safety Grades” twice a year. They assign hospitals all over the country a letter grade based on how well a facility keeps their patients safe. In order to develop that scale, they worked with a panel of medical experts from places like Johns Hopkins University of Nursing, Harvard, Stanford, UC Davis, Vanderbilt and the CDC.  

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It’s a task they don’t take lightly, so they look at quite a few different metrics to determine how safe hospitals keep their patients. They focus mainly on how well a hospital deals with infections, problems with surgery, safety problems like falls, collapsed lungs and blood clots, what measures they have in place to prevent errors, training of the doctors, nurses and other hospital staff and how well they communicate with each other. 

Leapfrog just released their Fall 2024 hospital grades for 14 Idaho hospitals and overall, it’s good news. In the Spring, just four Idaho hospitals had a perfect ‘A’ Safety grade. In the Fall, that number’s risen to six. We’ll recognize those hospitals with exceptional safety grades shortly, but first we want to call attention to one hospital that could certainly stand to make some improvements. 

Rexburg Hospital Earns a ‘D’ Grade for Patient Safety

Madison Memorial Hospital is the lone Idaho hospital with a ‘D’ grade. It’s been a slow slide backward from 2021 when the hospital maintained a ‘B’ grade in both the spring and fall releases that year. They even notched an A in Spring 2023. Unfortunately, Leapfrog says that they perform below average when it comes to surgical wounds splitting open or the patient experiencing blood clots or internal bleeding after surgery. Madison Memorial earned the worst score possible when it came to the number of patient falls or injuries. 

Leapfrog assigned them below average scores in categories like handwashing, safe medication administration and the number of doctors specially trained to deal with ICU patients because the hospital declined to report their performance for those measures. 

In the Spring, St. Al’s in Boise was the only hospital to receive a ‘D’ safety grade, but they’ve improved to a C this fall. 

Idaho Hospitals with a Shiny ‘A’ Safety Grade

Portneuf Medical Center - Pocatello

St. Joseph Regional Medical Center - Lewiston

St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center - Boise

St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center - Twin Falls 

St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center - Meridian 

St. Luke’s Nampa Medical Center - Nampa