How safe is your hospital? See the letter grade for each Philly-area facility in a new national report.

Philadelphia-area hospitals earned mostly good grades in a new national patient-safety scorecard that measured rates of infections, falls, and other adverse events.

More than 77% of hospitals in the city and its surrounding counties scored safety grades of “A” or “B” from the nonprofit Leapfrog Group, compared with 54% of hospitals nationwide.

Leapfrog based its grade for each hospital on 22 indicators from the federal government and the organization’s own hospital survey. In addition to the rates of adverse events, the indicators included how well each hospital followed procedures known to improve patient outcomes, such as practicing hand hygiene and assigning adequate numbers of physicians to intensive-care units.

Some physicians have questioned the value of such ratings, finding that evaluations conducted by different organizations sometimes do not agree with each other. Other critics have said hospital raters need to do a better job of “risk adjustment” — that is, grading hospitals on a curve by taking into account their patients’ underlying health conditions and socio-economic backgrounds.

The new Leapfrog survey included 45 Philadelphia-area general-service hospitals among nearly 3,000 nationwide. Specialty hospitals such as Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children were not included.

The lowest Leapfrog grade in the Philly area was a “D,” given to two hospitals: Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland and Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park, both part of the Crozer Health network.

Both hospitals scored worse than average on multiple safety measures, including the rates of patient falls, dangerous blood clots, and surgical wounds that split open.

The “D” grades do not reflect safety improvements that have been underway at Crozer since the data were collected, the health system’s chief executive officer Anthony Esposito said in an e-mailed statement.

”The data used to compile these ratings reflects a time period prior to our present leadership and is not reflective of our current operations,” he said. “We are actively working to complete the next Leapfrog survey to be released in June 2024 that should better showcase our quality measures.”

The data on dangerous clots and surgical wounds splitting open were calculated for a time period that ended in mid-2021, Leapfrog said. The rate of patient falls was from a period that ended in mid-2022.

Esposito, who announced in March that the health system was laying off 215 workers, was hired in July 2022.

Grades for individual hospitals anywhere in the country can be seen at hospitalsafetygrade.org, along with the details that make up each grade. A searchable list of Philly-area hospitals is below.