House of the Good Shepherd

With an address in Hackettstown, New Jersey, House of the Good Shepherd is one of a mere two available facilities in this city. Featuring an overall score of A, this nursing home is among the top nursing homes we looked at. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top fifth of all facilities in the United States. Keep reading to see this nursing home's category grades, which are also strong. It would be hard to find any major flaws in this nursing home's profile.

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ inspection grade. This grade is based on its recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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.

This facility also received an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+ category scores. In our short-term care category, we strive to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in New Jersey in this area with 63.9 percent of its patients returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. The nursing score assesses a handful of factors, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Out of this total, nearly one quarter of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. Lastly, this facility also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the number of its residents sustaining falls which lead to serious injury, this nursing home performed as well as any nursing home in the nation.

In our final area, we awarded this facility an A+ for its long-term care score. This completed an elite profile. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.08029 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.