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 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even 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.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home also excelled in our long-term care category. We gave it a grade of A- in this area. This completed a straight A profile. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.