Alaris Health at The Chateau

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this very important category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its top-shelf accomplishments in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care rating. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.250374 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility New Jersey in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving residents more often.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a B-. Even though this ended up being its worst category grade, this is still not a bad grade. In computing these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.