Cedarbrook Allentown

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

This facility performed well in the category of long-term care. As a result, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which is one of our most dominant scores. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 81.1311 percent of its residents. This is slightly lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing score weighs quite a few components, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident more frequently.

The next area we assessed is short-term care, which ended up being this nursing home's worst area. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. However, we wouldn't assess this facility based only on this area, as it had some superb scores in other areas. In our short-term care assessment, we try to create a valuable gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.7 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.