Southern Ocean Medical Center

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. We were not able to locate information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care scores are critical for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it supplied roughly 1.5 times as many physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. This is what we like to find when grading a facility in this category. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in New Jersey in this area with 71.9 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing rating assesses a handful of datapoints, however, the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 7.5 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was one of the more impressive totals we found. In addition, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in the state when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided.

In the final category, we gave this facility an A+ for its long-term care grade. This completed an elite report card. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility submitted information about vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.