Meadow Lakes

On top of earning a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled at short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. With our short-term care category, we try to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. 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.

Turning our third category, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. This is a superb grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.74796 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to our next category, this facility received a very strong nursing grade. We awarded it a B+ in that category, topping off one of our more impressive profiles. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 New Jersey in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.