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 99.28571 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.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. The nursing rating considers a number of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is significantly below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, proved to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a D in that category. This really was one of the few weak points in a quality report card. In computing these short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. It appears that this facility was below average in several staffing metrics we focus on. In fact, it supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.