Altercare Somerset

We also would like to emphasize that this facility has received nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A few minor dings aren't the end of the world.

Among its many dominant grades, this nursing home was awarded an excellent short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in this area. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most important for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. We weighed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home received a decent long-term care rating. While this wasn't quite as elite as many of its other category grades, this is still not a major area of concern. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.