Meridian Subacute Rehabilitation

Meridian Subacute Rehabilitation is a large non-profit nursing home located in Belmar, New Jersey. This nursing home proved to be an A+ facility. Being awarded an A+ in our rating scheme requires superb scores across the board. Indeed, we were so impressed with this facility that we rated it ahead of the majority of the facilities in Belmar, which has a good selection of facilities. Headlining this facility's remarkable profile is its inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility was given elite marks in the area of short-term care. For this reason, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. In forming our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 65 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also was elite in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A. Very few nursing homes performed better in this area. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this facility 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 a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility also excelled in our nursing category. We awarded it an A for that area. This topped off truly elite profile. Our nursing grade includes a number of subcategories. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility provided 5.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is among the highest totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by both of these statistics. In addition to offering high levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in the state when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these data points as good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.