Leisure Park Health Center

Leisure Park Health Center is in Lakewood, New Jersey. The city has 92,843 people. We gave this facility an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the nation. Based on our analysis, you can't go wrong with this place. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its short-term care grade. In determining these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. This place fared as well as just about any facility in New Jersey in this area with 76.4 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this area. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we rated was nursing. This nursing home received a better than average nursing score in our assessment, with a grade of B. Even though this isn't quite as good as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the better grades for that area. The nursing grade analyzes a handful of components, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics 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 being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.