Hospital Safety Grades: See How Community Medical Center Fared

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

Community Medical Center in Toms River, part of the Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas network, 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.

Community Medical Center fared well in most categories. It received only one below-average score in infections, and in safety events, its below-average scores were only slightly below average. Community had received Bs in the Spring 2022 and Fall 2021 reports, and an A in the Spring 2021 report.

Communication scores were below average and were based on patient reviews.

Community had below-average scores on sepsis, with 6.68 patients out of 1,000 suffering the infection, compared with an average of 4.96 per thousand for all hospitals; on deaths from serious treatable complications, with 168.51 deaths per 1,000 patients, compared with an average of 159.68; on serious breathing problems, with 8.95 per 1,000 patients, compared with 5.17.

Here are the grades received by nearby hospitals: Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch received As. Ocean University Medical Center in Brick 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.