Altercare Newark South

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an C. When calculating our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic.

This facility's second lowest score is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a well below average grade. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we scored was short-term care, turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area. In forming these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With a score this poor in this category, we were not shocked to learn that this place was below average in the two key staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.8 percent of its residents returning home.