Hebrew Home of Greater Washington

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many high-end scores, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A in that area. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing ratings are primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients more often.

In the last category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care score. This topped off a very favorable profile. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 91.12572 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a few points lower than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.