Ridgewood Specialty Care

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well 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 grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have few severe 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.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades came in the category of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this area. In computing these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. The nursing grade weighs a handful of subcategories, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The last area we rated is long-term care. We gave it an F for this category, which is a rock bottom score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Nursing homes that do not 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 looked at. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 91.9708 percent of its patients. This is somewhat less than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.