UVA Health Quality & Safety

At UVA, delivering the highest-quality, most advanced and safest healthcare to our patients is our top priority. That’s why we never stop striving to make our best better.

As a leading healthcare institution, our goal is to be the safest place in America to receive care and to work, because patient and team member safety is essential to providing the best healthcare. We use data from objective, independent sources to compare the care we provide at UVA to the care other hospitals provide. 

Whenever possible, we look at risk-adjusted data, which reflects the complex cases we treat. We also compare ourselves to “like” hospitals, meaning hospitals that treat about the same number and types of patients we do and also have residency training programs.

Academic medical centers like UVA care for the sickest patients, who are often most sensitive to developing complications because they are so severely ill. Many of these patients have transferred from community hospitals where they already received standard care that did not work. At UVA, it is our duty and mission to provide advanced care for severely ill patients with complex needs when other hospitals cannot.

How We Compare

These resources compare quality indicators at different hospitals across the country:

Accredited by The Joint Commission

UVA is accredited by The Joint Commission, whose mission is to continuously improve healthcare for the public by evaluating healthcare organizations. To earn and maintain accreditation, an organization must undergo an on-site survey by a Joint Commission team at least every three years.

Top Safety & Quality Rankings

UVA is a major academic medical center tasked with advancing medical understanding, as well as training doctors in highly specialized skills.

Our doctors work in teams to diagnose and treat patients, coordinate care and share information. Patients benefit from the combined knowledge of a team of experts rather than just one expert.

Even among academic medical centers, UVA is a leader, ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the nation's top hospitals. We’ve also been recognized as a Top Teaching Hospital.