Clara Maass Medical Center

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A+. With our short-term care assessment, we attempt to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. This was one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Our inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

Turning the page to our third area, we gave this facility a score of A for its long-term care score. This is a dominant rating. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. It does not look like this nursing home provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to our next category, this facility received an excellent nursing rating. We gave it an A in that area, rounding out a straight A profile. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.