Camden Health and Rehabilitation

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection score was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also awarded this nursing home a positive score in short-term care. This nursing home earned a B+ in this category, which turns out to be one of our more favorable grades. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The third area we analyzed is long-term care. This nursing home's received an unfortunate long-term care score where it was given an F. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinates 99.47369 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we scored was nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. It received an F in this category, which is clearly concerning. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This number is well below average. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.