Trinitas Hospital

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place New Jersey in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning patients more frequently.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also was strong in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. 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 this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final category we scored is long-term care. This facility was given a strong nursing score this year, with a grade of B. While this was not as good as a few of its other category grades, this remains one of our more favorable grades in this area. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.