Clara Maass Medical Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ in short-term care. Our short-term care scores are important for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of 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 final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 7.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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.

Moving on our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This is a very strong score. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. It doesn't look like this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last area, this facility also was given a first-rate nursing rating, with a grade of A. This topped off an elite profile. The nursing grade weighs a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.