Brighton Gardens of Edison

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled at short-term care, where it received an elite grade of A+. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility also received an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the rare places to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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.

This nursing home also was strong in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to our last area, this facility was awarded an excellent nursing score. We awarded it a grade of A in this area, giving this facility straight A's. Our nursing score weighs several data points. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.