New Jersey Veterans Home at Paramus

To go along with its excellent overall score, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. The nursing score analyzes several subcategories, however, the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning patients more often.

This nursing home also received a first-rate short-term care grade. This actually ended up being its second most impressive category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more important for folks requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The last area we rated is long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of A-. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Very few nursing homes earned an A- or better in every category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.311295 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.