Excelcare at Manalapan

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. Our inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we graded this nursing home so well is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care score. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second most impressive category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our higher scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. With our short-term care category, we strive to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next category we graded was nursing, in which this facility was given a grade of B-. Even though this proved to be its least impressive category rating, this is still a middle of the pack score. The nursing rating analyzes many data points, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is far below average. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in some quality-focused metrics. We look at the percentage of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are decent indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care can reduce these problems.