The New Jewish Home, Manhattan

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was awarded impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our better grades in this category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest score. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 93.11224 percent of its residents, which is a bit less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we graded was short-term care, where this facility received a grade of B- in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to our final category, we awarded this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. This was the facility's least impressive category rating. Sadly, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the number of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of those nurses. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.