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 When
Consumer Reports speaks, people listen – and this time the consumer advocacy agency is advising you on where to get your care – or not – if you need to go to the hospital. It’s the first time
Consumer Reports has investigated hospital safety,1 and the results show hospital ratings don’t always match public opinions. Some of the most well-known hospitals got the worst ratings.

 Except for the Mayo Clinic’s various campuses, which have exceptionally good scores, others like Mass General and Mount Sinai in New York, didn’t rate as well as you might expect. One hospital, Sacred Heart of Chicago, scoring an abysmal 16 on a 100-point safety scale was ranked the most dangerous in the country. A clinic in Billings, Montana scored the highest. Hospitals were ranked according to six critera:2

*Infections     
*Communications about safety issues     
*The degree to which you come right back in the hospital after you’ve been discharged     
*Situations in which too many imaging tests that expose you to radiation are being done     
*Common complications in unsafe hospital     
*Death rates for several conditions

An Epidemic of Health Care Harm…

    
“Infections, surgical mistakes, and other medical harm contributes to the deaths of 180,000 hospital patients a year
, according to projections based on a 2010 report from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Another 1.4 million are seriously hurt by their hospital care. And those figures apply only to Medicare patients.

     What happens to other people is less clear because most hospital errors go unreported and hospitals report on only a fraction of things that can go wrong.