Bloomfield Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to point out the fact that this facility was awarded an elite score of A- in our long-term care category. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.08917 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on our next area, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A- in this area. Our short-term care grades are arguably most meaningful for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility received an extremely favorable nursing score. While this wasn't quite as strong as some of its other grades, this remains one of our stronger grades a facility can receive. Our nursing score focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This facility was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.