Life Care Center of Red Bank

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. In calculating our long-term care scores, we scrutinize the personal care received by the facility's residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.324326 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care score. This is not one of our better scores. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. With its poor score in this area, we were not stunned to discover this nursing home offered substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last area we looked at is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is certainly a major disappointment. When calculating our nursing ratings, we look at both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This nursing home also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this metric. This is alarming when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing grade.