North Mississippi Medical Center, is shown in Tupelo, Miss., on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004. (AP Photo/The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, C. Todd Sherman)

The nonprofit Leapfrog Group released its hospital safety grades for the fall of 2022, and 12 Mississippi hospitals – including the financially troubled Greenwood Leflore Hospital –  received an A rating.

The grade, which is assigned to about 3,000 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice a year, is based on how hospitals and other health care organizations protect their patients from errors, injuries, accidents and infections. The score comes from hospitals’ performance on more than 30 national measures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and other data.

The state’s largest hospital and only academic medical center scored a C for the fourth year in a row.

No Mississippi hospitals received an F grade, and one hospital received a D: Merit Health Biloxi. Each grade is based on hospitals’ performance in five categories: infections, problems with surgery, safety problems, practices to prevent errors, and doctors, nurses and hospital staff.

“Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors,” its website states.

According to the group, 250,000 people die each year from preventable errors in hospitals.

Here is the breakdown of grades for Mississippi hospitals:

Graphic by Bethany Atkinson

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Kate Royals is a Jackson native and returned to Mississippi Today as the lead education reporter after serving in the same capacity from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, she was a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger covering education and state government. She won awards for her investigative work, including stories about the state’s campaign finance laws and prison system. She was a news producer at MassLive in Springfield, Mass., after graduating from Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications with a master’s degree in communications.