Hospital Safety Grades: Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus

LAKEWOOD, NJ — The fall Hospital Safety Grades report by the Leapfrog Group was released Wednesday for hospitals across the country and across New Jersey.

Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus in Lakewood received a B for this round of grading.

The Leapfrog Group, an independent nonprofit healthcare watchdog group, releases grades twice a year, in the fall and the spring, and its reports look at how well hospitals protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries and infections.

The group provides grades to 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.

In New Jersey, 33 hospitals received an A, 20 hospitals received a B, 14 hospitals received a C and 3 hospitals received a D grade. Zero hospitals received an F.

Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus, which has received Bs going back to 2020 and received an A in the Spring 2020 report, received below-average scores on MRSA infections and urinary tract infections, which reflected higher than expected instances of infections than were expected for the hospital, according to Leapfrog.

Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus also had a below-average score on deaths from serious treatable complications, with 182.96 deaths per 1,000 patients, compared with an average of 159.68 deaths for all hospitals; and on dangerous blood clots, with 4.02 per 1,000 compared with an average of 3.61 deaths.

Communications scores, which reflect patients' opinions, were below average in every category except communications about discharges.

Here are the grades received by nearby hospitals: Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch received As. Community Medical Center in Toms River and Ocean University Medical Center in Brick received Bs, and CentraState Medical Center in Freehold and Southern Ocean Medical Center in Manahawkin received Cs.

You can read their reports here.

With the release of its fall report, The Leapfrog Group has analyzed hospital safety data for a decade. Most hospitals have improved over time under more public scrutiny, Leapfrog Group President and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

“For a long time, the healthcare community tried to improve safety, but progress stalled,” Binder said. “The big difference over this decade is that for the first time, we publicly reported each hospital’s record on patient safety, and that galvanized the kind of change we all hoped for.

“It’s not enough change, but we are on the right track,” she said.

Notably, hospitals reduced what are called “never events” — accidents and errors that never should have happened, the release said. Incidents of falls and trauma and incidents in which objects were unintentionally left in a patient’s body during surgery were down 25 percent, the watchdog group said.

Also, according to the report, progress on the number of patients treated for healthcare-associated infections declined to pre-pandemic levels.