Delmar Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of accomplishments, it also received a top-shelf short-term care grade. We awarded them a dominant strong of A- in this category. Our short-term care ratings are likely most important for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. 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 critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home was given a high-end nursing score. This facility didn't prove to have any identifiable weaknesses. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient even once per day.