Hospital Safety Grades 2023: Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus

LAKEWOOD, NJ — The semiannual hospital safety grades have been released for the spring by The Leapfrog Group, and Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus in Lakewood has received high marks.

The Leapfrog Group,an independent nonprofit health care watchdog, uses an academic grading scale with five letter grades to score nearly 3,000 hospitals nationwide on more than 30 measures of patient safety. Leapfrog says its hospital rating system is the only one in the country focusing solely on a hospital’s ability to protect patients from preventable errors. The spring 2023 rankings cover late 2021 and 2022.

Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus was among 31 New Jersey hospitals to receive an A in the Spring 2023 hospital safety grades. There were 17 hospitals that received a B, and 11 hospitals received a C. No hospitals in New Jersey received a D or an F.

The grades track items such as health care-associated infections of MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; central line-associated bloodstream infections; catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and Clostridioides difficile, or C.Diff. All of those infections can be deadly for some patients.

Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus received an A after receiving Bs for the previous five reports. It performed better than average in preventing infections except for sepsis, and its score on that category was only six-tenths above the average for all hospitals. It performed only slightly worse in safety problems, with higher-than-average occurrences of patient falls resulting in injury, falls causing broken hips, and collapsed lungs.

Nearby, Community Medical Center in Toms River, Hackensack Meridian Ocean University Medical Center in Brick, Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch all received As, and Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center in Manahawkin received a B.

Michelle Rotuno-Johnson and Patch national staff contributed to this report.