Complete Care at Lehigh

One of the many reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this facility also received favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 96.21622 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, where this nursing home received a grade of B. Believe it or not, this is this nursing home's weakest area. A facility is doing something right when their lowest grade still beats out most other nursing homes. In computing our nursing scores, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a patient even once per day.