Ridgewood Health Campus

In addition to being a top notch nursing home overall, it also performed well in inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this category. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its dominant resume, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a score of A in the category. Our short-term care scores are important for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our stronger scores in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.039215 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored was nursing, where this facility was awarded a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. A nursing home is doing something right when their worst score still is superior to most other nursing homes. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.3 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 facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient more often.