Care One at Essex Park

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This nursing home was awarded impressive marks in the area of short-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our highest scores in that category with a area of A-. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is considered to be a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. We weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our third area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.962654 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we rated is nursing. We awarded this nursing home one of our more favorable scores in this category, with a B. This nursing home turned out to be very solid in each category we looked at. Nursing scores are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.