New NJ Hospital Safety Ratings For 2024: See Best, Worst

NEW JERSEY — Several hospitals in New Jersey were given top safety grades in The Leapfrog Group’s spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades released Wednesday.

The independent, nonprofit watchdog group assigned safety grades, ranging from “A” to “F,” for 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents and infections.

The Leapfrog Group, which grades hospitals twice a year, also ranked the 10 states with the highest number of “A” hospitals. Utah tops the list, followed by Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Alaska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, respectively.

In New Jersey, 30 hospitals receiving the top letter grade were:

• Hackensack Meridian Hackensack University Medical Center (Hackensack)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Hackensack Meridian Palisades Medical Center (North Bergen)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Hunterdon Medical Center (Flemington)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• St. Mary's General Hospital (Passaic)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Holy Name Medical Center (Teaneck)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• The Valley Hospital (Ridgewood)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Morristown Medical Center (Morristown)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Rahway (Rahway)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Inspira Medical Center Vineland (Vineland)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Hackensack Meridian Raritan Bay Medical Center (Perth Amboy)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Virtua Voorhees Hospital (Voorhees)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Community Medical Center (Toms River)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Englewood Hospital and Medical Center (Englewood)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Jefferson Cherry Hill Hospital (Cherry Hill)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Overlook Medical Center (Summit)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Hackensack Meridian Ocean University Medical Center (Brick)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Jefferson Washington Township Hospital (Turnersville)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• St. Luke's Warren Campus (Phillipsburg)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Saint Clare's Hospital of Dover (Dover)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Inspira Medical Center Elmer (Elmer)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Saint Peter's University Hospital (New Brunswick)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center (Neptune)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Monmouth Medical Center (Long Branch)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus (Lakewood)
• Fall 2023 score: A
• Saint Michael's Medical Center (Newark)
• Fall 2023 score: C
• Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton (Hamilton)
• Fall 2023 score: C
• Hackensack Meridian Bayshore Medical Center (Holmdel)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• St. Joseph's Wayne Medical Center (Wayne)
• Fall 2023 score: B
• Virtua Marlton Hospital (Marlton)
• Fall 2023 score: A

Overall, New Jersey had:

• 23 hospitals that earned “B” grades;
• 11 hospitals that earned “C” grades; and
• 1 hospital that earned a “D” grade (that grade went to CarePoint Health-Christ Hospital in Jersey City).

For the first time this spring, the watchdog ranked the top 25 metropolitan statistical reporting areas according to the number of “A” hospitals. The top three metro areas are Allentown, Pennsylvania; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton metro area in PA/NJ ranked No. 1 among the top 25.

Nationwide, hospitals showed improvements over their fall 2023 performance in both reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient experiences, the report said.

Hospital-acquired infections and preventable errors kill about 250,000 people a year in the United States, making patient safety problems the nation’s third-leading cause of death, according to a summary of peer-reviewed research published in the global health care journal BMJ.

Hospital-acquired infections soared to levels not seen since 2016 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since that spike, 92 percent of hospitals showed improved performance on at least one of three dangerous infections, the report said.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections were down by 34 percent, and both catheter-associated urinary tract infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections decreased by 30 percent.

Despite the improvements, “patient safety remains a crisis-level hazard in health care,” Leapfrog Group president and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

“Some hospitals are much better than others at protecting patients from harm, and that’s why we make the Hospital Safety Grade available to the public and why we encourage all hospitals to focus more attention on safety,” Binder said.

Patient experiences have worsened since the pandemic, and while the spring report shows improvement, patients don’t report the same level of confidence they had before the pandemic, according to the report.

Patient experience is measured through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to publicly report how hospital patients measure the care they received.

The five measures are nurse communication, doctor communication, hospital staff responsiveness, communication about medicines and discharge information.

“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” Binder said. “We were also pleased to see the decrease in preventable infections, which cause terrible suffering and sometimes death. When we look at these positive trends, we see lives saved — and that is gratifying.”