Lopatcong Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You really can't do much better than a deficiency-free inspection report.

This facility performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. Our short-term care ratings are presumably most meaningful for patients in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's weakest area is long-term care, which is the last category we scored. For this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. We would like to to draw your attention to this possible weak link, but you should not focus exclusively on one bad area either. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to patient care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated just 82.729805 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.