Preakness Healthcare Center

Preakness Healthcare Center is one of eight available facilities located in Wayne, New Jersey. It looks like this nursing home is among the most impressive nursing homes we assessed. This facility received one of the highest scores that we offer. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top 20 percent of all nursing homes nationally. Headlining this nursing home's stellar profile is its long-term care rating, which you can find in the next paragraph.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of very favorable nursing hour statistics, this facility's vaccination statistics is top notch as well. Indeed, this facility vaccinated 99.92743 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Finally, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this facility had 2.19 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Our nursing score includes a handful of datapoints, but the main one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides an incredible 4.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls leading to serious injury, this nursing home performed as well as any facility New Jersey. Avoiding serious falls is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home received a better than average short-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Although this is not quite as good as many of its other grades, this is nevertheless a respectable grade in this area. In crafting our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that just 26.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.