Jefferson Health Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of offering very favorable levels of nurse staffing, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 98.8417 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 2.81 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this category, this statistic may be skewed for some facilities due to some of the medical complexity of residents.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing scores are largely associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, of which a significant portion was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With below five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any place the state in this category.

The third category we analyzed is short-term care. Adding to its elite resume, this facility also performed well in this area. In fact, it received a of A in that area. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical nursing home. This is certainly an encouraging sign. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in New Jersey in this area with 59.2 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Lastly, this nursing home also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a score of B+. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.