Daughters of Miriam Center

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly flawless. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down deficiency data for this facility. Without having the deficiency related data for this facility, it is difficult to fully evaluate the place in this category.

This facility also was dominant in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. It fared as well as just about any nursing home in New Jersey in this area with 62.9 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term patients are able to return home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. When determining our nursing scores, we analyze both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provides an impressive 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Out of this total, more than one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly trained levels of nurses. We apply more weight to hours worked by skilled nurses in calculating our nursing scores. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next area we looked at was long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B-. This proved to be this facility's least impressive category. This is still not a major area of concern. Our long-term care grade is used to gauge a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 94.384056 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.