Complete Care at Lehigh

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not 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.

This nursing home also was given an A+ long-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be given several A+ category scores. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.0172 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also was elite in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this category. With our short-term care grade, we seek to craft a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The final category we assessed is nursing, in which this facility received a grade of B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this facility's least impressive category. A nursing home is doing something right when it's worst grade still is superior to most nursing homes. Our nursing grade is based on quite a few components, but the most important one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.