Ridgewood Center

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home averages 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents even once per day.

This nursing home was given its third highest category score in the category of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in this area, which is a reasonably acceptable score. In the area of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. In fact, we found that it outperformed the majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 55.1 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most nursing homes.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a D for long-term care, leaving this as the nursing home's worst category. Facilities that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 90.254234 percent of its patients. This is multiple points less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 1.43 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.