Nazareth Home Clifton

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for our inspection category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its elite resume, this facility also excelled in our short-term care area. In fact, it received a score of A in that category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this area. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.41255 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we looked at was nursing, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. While this wound up being its worst category grade, this is nevertheless not a major area of concern. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.