The Oaks at Denville

We gave this nursing home one of our higher scores in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A+. This is notably better than the nursing home's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our short-term care grades are crucial for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A+. Nursing scores are mostly tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Unfortunately, this facility only earned a grade of D for its long-term care grade, which is not a score to write home about. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 90.29851 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit lower than the national average. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

The final category we looked at is inspections. This wasn't one of this facility's stronger areas. We gave it a D in this area. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we typically take this one very seriously. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was assessed a deficiency by CMS. We were relieved to find that it wasn't in one of the categories that suggest that it posed a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed large government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This typically suggests that a nursing home's bad performance spanned more than one year.