Good Shepherd Home-Bethlehem

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade is mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also would like to alert you to the fact that this nursing home received an impressive score of A in our long-term care area. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 65.271965 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility received a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this category, rounding out a straight A profile. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.