The Estates at Linden

To pair with its favorable overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for the area of inspections. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home truly excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Very few nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Switching gears to our fourth category, we awarded this facility a D in long-term care. This is the nursing home's weakest category rating. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.18033 percent of its patients, which is more than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.