Forest Hill Healthcare Center

Forest Hill Healthcare Center is in Newark, New Jersey. This city is among the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the nation with has 277,237 people. With an A- overall grade, we ranked this facility in the top third of all facilities in the United States. We couldn't find many bad things to say about this nursing home. Its ratings are just impeccable. Keep reading to find this facility's category scores, which are also quite good. It is hard to poke holes in this facility's profile.

To go along with a strong overall score, we gave this facility an A for inspections. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was superb in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Not many nursing homes fared better in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is more often than not a reliable assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. One reason for this place's impressive rating in this area is that it provides a significantly greater volume of hours of physical therapy to its patients than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 66.2 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also fared very well in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Very few facilities fared better in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility 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 patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next area we assessed proved to be this nursing home's poorest category. Nevertheless, even its lowest point would be a highlight for many facilities. In fact, we awarded it a strong grade of B in our nursing category. Our nursing grade is largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.