The Tcu at Nazareth Hospital

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this area. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This score is based on the place's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the biggest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The third category we analyzed is long-term care. Adding to its first-rate profile, this nursing home also excelled in that category. In fact, we awarded it a of A for that category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the fourth category, this nursing home was given an extremely favorable nursing rating. We awarded it a grade of A- in this category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. The nursing rating includes a host of factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.