Essex Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong facility is that it earned a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections is its best category. In that category, we gave it an A-. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care score. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing rating assesses many components, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, while this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic.

The next area we looked at was short-term care. For this category, we awarded this facility a C. With our short-term care assessment, we strive to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.