Hospital Safety Grades 2023: How Community Medical Center Fared

TOMS RIVER, NJ — The semiannual hospital safety grades have been released for the spring by The Leapfrog Group, and Community Medical Center in Toms River 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.

Community Medical Center, part of the RWJ Barnabas network, 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.

Community Medical Center, which received an A after receiving Bs for the previous three reports, performed better than average in its prevention of infections with the exception of sepsis, and its rating there was just six-tenths of a point higher than the average number of infections for all hospitals rated.

Of all categories in the report, Community Medical Center's only significantly worse score was on serious breathing problems after surgery, where it received an 8.62, above the average of 6.73; the "number represents the number of times patients experienced serious breathing problems for every 1,000 people who had surgery," according to the report.

Nearby, Hackensack Meridian Ocean University Medical Center in Brick, Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus in Lakewood, 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.