Beth Israel at Shalom Park

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly flawless. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning our next area, this facility was given an excellent short-term care grade. In fact, it received a score of A- in that area. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In the final category we rated, this facility was given a very strong grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this grade, the facility completed a straight A profile. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 81.2 percent of its patients, which is somewhat below what we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.