Allendale Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few 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 did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing rating. We gave it an B+ in that category. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place New Jersey in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving residents more often.

The third category we looked at is short-term care. This nursing home was awarded an above average short-term care grade, with a grade of B in this area. Our short-term care ratings are probably more meaningful for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that area. Sadly, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average figure. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.