FARMINGTON — Franklin Memorial Hospital has been awarded an “A” grade for hospital patient safety by the independent hospital watchdog The Leapfrog Group.

The first and only hospital safety rating to be peer-reviewed in the Journal of Patient Safety, the Hospital Safety Score is free to the public and designed to give consumers information they can use to protect themselves and their families when facing a hospital stay.

Developed under the guidance of Leapfrog’s blue ribbon expert panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single A, B, C, D or F score, representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm. More than 2,500 U.S. general hospitals were assigned scores in October 2015.