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Published May 6, 2025

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The nonprofit Leapfrog Group has released its latest hospital safety grades. Find out here how your local hospital fared.

Patch Staff

PITTSBURGH, PA — Ten hospitals in the Pittsburgh region received an"A" grade for preventing medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections in a new nationwide hospital safety analysis. But 12 received a "C" grade and two were graded a "D," meaning patients are more likely to die a preventable death at those facilities than those graded higher.

The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit organization committed to improving the quality and safety of American health care, assesses nearly 3,000 hospitals nationwide twice a year. Leapfrog uses more than 30 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources.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.

What follows are the grades for Pittsburgh-area hospitals:

A Grades

Allegheny Health Network Wexford, Wexford

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Allegheny Valley, Harrison

Forbes, Monroeville

St. Clair Health, Mt. Lebanon

UPMC East, Monroeville

UPMC Mercy, Uptown

UPMC Passavant, McCandless

UPMC Passavant, Cranberry

UPMC St. Margaret, Aspinwall

East Liverpool City

B Grades

Allegheny General, North Side

Jefferson Regional, Jefferson Hills

Canonsburg General, Canonsburg

Butler Memorial, Butler

C Grades

UPMC Presbyterian, Shadyside

West Penn, Lawrenceville

UPMC Shadyside

UPMC McKeesport

UPMC Heritage Valley, Sewickley

UPMC Washington

Westmoreland Hospital Independence Health, Greensburg

Armstrong County Memorial, Kittanning

Uniontown

Latrobe Hospital Indepence Health

Heritage Valley, Beaver

D Grades

Penn Highlands Mon Valley, Monongahela

Weirton Medical Center

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PENNSYLVANIA — Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy on Monday for the second time in less than two years after the previous restructuring lessened the pharmacy chain's debt but still left it on unsound financial footing.

The company listed liabilities in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion in a Chapter 11 petition filed in New Jersey bankruptcy court.

The Philadelphia-based drug store chain also announced it is seeking a buyer, and said that re-filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection will speed that process.

For now, Rite Aid plans to keep its stores open, the company said in a statement. However, in a brief address on Monday, Schroeder told employees that all stores would either be closed or sold, people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.

“While we have continued to face financial challenges, intensified by the rapidly evolving retail and healthcare landscapes in which we operate, we are encouraged by meaningful interest from a number of potential national and regional strategic acquirors,” Rite Aid CEO Matt Schroeder said in a statement. “As we move forward, our key priorities are ensuring uninterrupted pharmacy services for our customers and preserving jobs for as many associates as possible.”

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Rite Aid said customers can continue to access pharmacy services and products in stores and online, including prescriptions and immunizations. In connection with the sale process and court-supervised proceedings, the company said it is working to facilitate a smooth transfer of customer prescriptions to other pharmacies.

Rite Aid employees will continue to receive pay and benefits. But the company told employees it will cut jobs after failing to secure additional financing from its lenders, Bloomberg News reported, citing an internal letter from Schroeder.

Rite-Aid is the nation's third largest pharmacy chain behind CVS and Walgreens. All three have suffered financial difficulties and shuttered hundreds of stores in recent years.

Rite-Aid operated about 2,000 pharmacies as recently as 2023 but now has only about 1,240 stores as it enters its second bankruptcy.

Public health advocates are concerned about the effect of federal budget cuts and layoffs on efforts to prevent childhood lead poisoning in Pennsylvania.

“We’re at risk in Pennsylvania,” said Rosemarie Halt, chair of the Lead Free Promise Project of Pennsylvania. “Having this funding interrupted will interrupt a lot of really good programs.”

Layoffs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the federal Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program staff in its entirety, said Halt.

Cuts to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) also froze some funding to state and local governments, she said, such as a $500,000 grant that had just been awarded to the city of Chester, Pa., for lead poisoning prevention efforts in the community.

The cuts were part of what HHS described as a “dramatic restructuring” as part of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Workplace Optimization Initiative. In a March 27 press release announcing the cuts, HHS said that the reduction of about 10,000 full-time employees would save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year.

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the time. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.

In response to HHS cuts that terminated federal grants to state agencies, Pennsylvania and 22 other states sued the federal government on April 1, alleging that the government had violated existing contracts. In Pennsylvania, those grants amounted to $500 million dollars, according to a press release from the state.

Lead is a neurotoxin that can impair brain development, particularly when children are exposed before the age of 6. Lead exposure most commonly occurs through peeling or flaking lead paint or household dust containing lead, though it can also be ingested through water traveling through lead pipes, soil or in the air near industrial facilities.

Pennsylvania has the fourth-oldest housing stock in the nation, and 80% of housing in Allegheny County was built before 1978, when lead paint was outlawed.

In 2023, 3.12% of children in Allegheny County tested positive for what the CDC defines as an elevated blood lead level of over 3.5 ​​micrograms of lead per deciliter.

The federal government distributes money to state and local governments through its Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.

It is unclear what the effect of the layoffs will be on programs that are currently receiving federal funding.

“If they fired all the staff, we’re all assuming there’s nobody monitoring the grants,” said Halt. “We’re still trying to determine what it looks like in Pennsylvania, but there’s nobody to ask.”

A Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization, Women for a Healthy Environment, has a three-year grant from the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, receiving $190,940 each year.

At Women for a Healthy Environment, the grant money is used to provide workshops on how to identify lead in the home and assess the risk, conduct lead inventory risk assessments in homes, provide training to contractors and run public awareness campaigns on social media and other sources.

“We certainly are hopeful that federal funding will continue because we know that’s a critical resource,” said Michelle Naccarati-Chapkis, executive director of Women for a Healthy Environment. “I think it’s the question of the unknown at this point. At this point we are proceeding with business as usual.”

Allegheny County is in the second year of a three-year federal grant from the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, receiving $31,000 per year. The money is used for outreach and education to the general public and to families with children with elevated lead levels.

In addition to the effect that the layoffs could have on state and local grants, both Naccarati-Chapkis and Halt expressed concern about the impact that the staff reduction could have on lead prevention efforts nationally. The employees at the CDC who lost their jobs were instrumental in tracing cases of very high lead levels in children to the cinnamon in applesauce pouches manufactured in Ecuador. The effort led to a recall of 3 million applesauce pouches starting in October of 2023.

“The department that investigated that was cut,” said Halt. “They were putting everything from the states together, figuring out where the applesauce was concentrated. Who is going to do that? The local governments and states can’t do that.”

There have been some indications that the Childhood Lead Prevention Program could be moved into a different division within HHS, but likely without the same staff to support it, said Halt.

“There is a great deal of fear right now in public health,” said Halt, “because we just don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

First Published: May 3, 2025, 1:00 a.m. Updated: May 3, 2025, 12:40 p.m.

Anya Sostek is a Post-Gazette health reporter who has been with the organization since 2004. A Duke University graduate, she previously worked as a business, education, news and features reporter.

asostek@post-gazette.com

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