Beth Sholom

In addition to faring well in its overall grade, this nursing home received even higher grades in the area of short-term care. It received one of our best scores in that area with A-. In calculating these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed well in the category of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an B+. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. When calculating a facility's nursing rating, we look at the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided 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 in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we looked at is long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in that category. This is not a bad grade in this area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 78.731346 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.