Daywatch: How Illinois ranks for hospital safety
Good morning, Chicago. Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.
Good morning, Chicago.
In what’s surely every patient’s nightmare, foreign objects such as surgical sponges sometimes get left behind inside the body during surgery.
It happens only rarely, but to help avoid it, health care workers have traditionally counted surgical sponges during procedures to make sure they’re all accounted for. Some hospitals, including Rush University Medical Center, have added a second layer of protection: using sponges with radio frequency identification technology. That way, at the end of a surgery, operating room staff can wave a wand over the patient and get an alert if any sponges are still inside.
It’s just one example of the types of measures Illinois hospitals have implemented in recent years to improve patient safety — an effort that may be paying off, according to the latest Leapfrog Group hospital safety grades. Illinois now ranks 20th in the country, up from 30th a year ago, for the percentage of its hospitals earning A grades for safety.
Though Illinois improved its ranking overall, the ratings were a mixed bag for individual Illinois hospitals, with more hospitals notching A grades but also more earning Ds than when grades were last released in the fall.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Lisa Schencker.
Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day, including two measles cases confirmed in Cook County, the latest on the teen curfew debate and evaluating the first month of the season for the Chicago White Sox.
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Bill Belichick defends girlfriend Jordon Hudson as ‘doing her job’ after CBS interview
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Dance for Life announces lineup for 2025, its biggest in decades
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Yet she witnessed poverty’s corrosion of ambition and hope. When a Sun-Times reporter called with the news that she’d won a Pulitzer, the lights in her flat were turned off. The electricity bill hadn’t been paid.
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