By Eric Carney, President and CEO, Monmouth Medical Center & Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus
Recent articles and social media posts regarding RWJBarnabas Health’s plans to expand Monmouth Medical Center’s globally recognized care to the Vogel Medical Campus in Tinton Falls have grossly misstated and misrepresented the facts about this proposal. The opposition to the proposed plan that questions our commitment to the most vulnerable people in the communities we serve are inaccurate and, frankly, wrong.
To be clear, Monmouth Medical Center is not closing.
Our Certificate of Need application to the New Jersey Department of Health includes plans to relocate our inpatient Maternity, Pediatrics and Medical/Surgical services to the Vogel Medical Campus and to make significant investments in our Long Branch Campus. We are confident in our ability to meet the unique needs of every patient who relies on our hospital while balancing our mission to make health care more accessible for our community.
We will expand emergency care capacity in the county by operating full-service Emergency Rooms in both Long Branch and Tinton Falls. The Vogel Medical Campus will also add Maternity and NICU beds to the region to meet the growing needs of our community.
Statements by those in opposition ignore the reality that RWJBarnabas is building a network of care to meet the future needs of Monmouth County. The truth that RWJBarnabas Health provides twice the amount of health care to beneficiaries of the Medicaid and Charity Care programs than any other health system in New Jersey. Our system’s unwavering commitment to every community we serve is further demonstrated through the investment in the Vogel Medical Campus.
In 2025, Monmouth Medical Center will care for nearly 21,000 individuals in the core services that will transition to the Vogel Medical Campus in 2032. Of these, 7,000 qualify for Medicaid coverage—that is more than three out of ten patients. Moreover, 90% of these Medicaid beneficiaries travel from outside of Long Branch to access our care, including from the majority of Monmouth County, as well as Southern Middlesex and Northern Ocean counties.
Monmouth Medical Center is not a hospital that cares for people from one zip code. Because of our globally recognized care—and more importantly caring—we have become a regional medical center that is a destination for the clinical services we provide. In fact, 86% of the people cared for in our hospital this year live outside of Long Branch and 95% of the babies born in our Maternity Center are to families outside of Long Branch.
While the Vogel Medical Campus is only 6 miles from our current Long Branch campus, it is easily accessible from the Garden State Parkway and Route 18. This makes the location more accessible to the majority of people that we are honored to serve today.
Our Long Branch campus will become a destination center for inpatient and outpatient Behavioral Health and maintain critical outpatient services such as Radiology and Surgery, while maintaining a full-service emergency department. We will also maintain 24 observation beds for patients to who need to be hospitalized overnight for medical conditions, further complementing our full-service Emergency Room in Long Branch. To ensure access to care that will now be located at the Vogel Medical Campus, we are committing to provide free on-demand transportation services from Long Branch to Tinton Falls. Ambulances will also be stationed at the Long Branch campus to facilitate any emergency transports.
These are the facts our community deserves as they reflect on our vision for the future of Monmouth Medical Center. They also further demonstrate our commitment to the vulnerable communities we serve and our mission to make health care more accessible.
Monmouth Medical Center is much more than a brick building in Long Branch; we are part of the fabric of every community we are blessed to serve. We accomplish this through our community health partnerships, our support of other mission-oriented non-profit organizations and exceptional compassion. Simply stated, we collectively show up when it matters most for those who need the most.
The future investments we are making in Long Branch to better support people in need of behavioral health care and the opportunity to build the state-of-the-art hospital our patients deserve are exciting and transformative. We love our future—and because of our work to enhance health care delivery in Monmouth County, we believe you will too.