River's Edge Rehabilitation & Living Center

On top of faring well overall, this nursing home earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. When calculating our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. 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 facility 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 also was strong in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next category we scored was long-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B. Believe it or not, this was this nursing home's worst category. A facility is doing something right when it's poorest grade still is better than most other nursing homes. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 97.333336 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.