Cranbury Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Another one of this nursing home's better category scores was in the category of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B+. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this area. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is typically a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When computing our nursing ratings, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

The next area we graded is long-term care, which was this facility's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is clearly a major concern. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.