Focused Care at Linden

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility also was given a favorable long-term care grade. Indeed, we gave them a B in that area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a C in this area. With our short-term care category, we seek to forge a fair measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that just 5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

Turning to our fourth area, this facility received an acceptable nursing score of C. Our nursing rating consists of quite a few subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, while this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this subcategory.