TOLEDO, OH (WTOL) - An unfavorable national report has resurfaced, putting a local hospital in a negative light.
Mercy St. Anne's Hospital was ranked one of the 12 lowest performing hospitals in the nation when it comes to infection prevention. The original story was published by Consumer Reports close to a year ago, but popped up this week after some of those hospitals responded to the original report.
In the original Consumer Reports article, Mercy St. Anne was ranked near the bottom of a list of hospitals in the U.S. because it had a poor track record of preventing infection in their patients. Those findings were based on data collected by the publisher between October 2013 and September 2014.
Hospitals were ranked based on their infection rates for two of the most common and deadly bacterial infections, MRSA and C. diff.
With the latest article in Consumer Reports, Mercy is once again defending St. Anne, saying they don't agree with the study at all.
Mercy said in a statement:
"The health and safety of our patients remains our utmost priority. At Mercy, we strive continuously to enhance care to ensure patients receive the highest quality of care in any Mercy facility where they seek treatment.
While we believe transparency is important and provides an opportunity for us as an industry to learn and share best practices, we encourage patients to understand how data is collected and reported on various websites and publications. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), via their website hospitalcompare.gov, is considered the source of truth for health care data and has a sound statistical process applied equally to all hospitals across the country. The Consumer Reports rating is contrary to CMS which shows that St. Anne is equal to or better than national benchmarks on all safety and quality measures. We believe the Consumer Reports' rating system is an inaccurate assessment of our quality and uses data that is statistically too small as part of their methodology.
Mercy and Mercy Health, our parent organization and the largest health system in Ohio, have robust initiatives in place around patient safety and are proud of the care we provide each and every day to the community in Toledo."
A rep with Mercy says they were never asked to provide a response to the original story. But this time they will be proactive and issue Consumer Reports a response.
