Lehigh Valley Hospital Tsu

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This exemplary facility also was superb in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 7.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also was dominant in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Not many facilities performed better in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information on its vaccination levels. 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 only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the final area, this facility also was given a first-rate nursing grade, with a grade of A. This completed a rare straight A report card. There are several factors within this area. Many of these subcategories are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.