Montclair Care Center

To go along with a strong overall grade, we awarded this place an A+ for our inspection category. Our inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Compounding its strong assessments in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A for our short-term care rating. Short-term care grades are often employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of B. It outpaced most nursing homes in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we looked at was nursing. This facility was awarded a better than average nursing score this year, with a grade of B. Although this was not nearly as elite as some of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the stronger scores in this category. There are quite a few factors within this area. Many of the data points relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving patients more frequently.