Manahawkin Convalescent Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an B-. In calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the amount of time nurses commit to patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.

The next most favorable area we awarded this facility in any area came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 94.65875 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's worst area was short-term care, which is the last category we scored. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category. Despite several decent scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless alarming so we wanted to point it out. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.