Hospital Safety Grades: See How Ocean University Medical Center Fared

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

Ocean University Medical Center in Brick, part of the Hackensack Meridian network, received a B for this round of grading. The hospital had received As every cycle going back to the spring of 2019.

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.

Ocean University Medical Center fared well in most categories, and on items where it was downgraded, most of the scores were just above the average scores among all hospitals.

Preventing infections was one area where the scores reflected a concern, with both MRSA infections and surgical site infections after colon surgery showing higher-than-average instances of infections than expected. Under "Safety Problems," the hospital was marked "below average" on patient falls, falls causing broken hips and dangerous blood clots, and in each instance the scores — which reflected the number of instances per 1,000 patients — were only slightly below average. Patient falls were 0.445 per 1,000, just above the 0.41 average for all hospitals; falls causing broken hips 0.11 per 1,000, just above the 0.09 average; and blood clots were 3.78 per 1,000, compared with an average 3.61 per 1,000.

The lowest scores Ocean University Medical Center received were on communication and reflected patients' opinions on how doctors and nurses communicated with them.

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 Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus (formerly Kimball Medical Center) in Lakewood 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.