Ridgewood Care Center

This facility really excelled in our short-term care category, with an A- in this category. This really boosted its overall score. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an B+. Few nursing homes performed as well in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. We looked at the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's worst area is long-term care, which is the last category we looked at. It received a lowly F in this category. In spite of a few decent scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless disappointing so we would like to to make a note of it. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 96.17647 percent of its residents, which is a very solid figure. To our surprise, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.