Princeton Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded it a first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. 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 offered.

The last category we graded is short-term care, which ended up being this facility's worst category. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously a major concern. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is typically a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 2.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.