Ridgewood Specialty Care

While we were not high on this facility's overall score, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that have a long list of deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an B-. There are a host of subcategories within this grade. Many of the datapoints reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care score. This is well below average in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is frequently a reliable measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we found that this facility provides substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home did not fare well in this category either. With an abysmal grade of F in long-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 97.47475 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.