Forest Hill Healthcare Center

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this nursing home excelled in inspections, where it received an A. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to note the fact that this nursing home received an elite grade of A in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Compounding its first-rate assessment, this nursing home also was awarded an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.54128 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the final area, we gave this facility an A for our nursing score. This finished off a first-rate profile. Our nursing grade analyzes several subcategories, but the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility New Jersey 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 employing a policy of turning residents at least once a day.