Albany County Nursing Home

Albany County Nursing Home is a very-large government-owned facility in Albany, New York. Sporting an overall grade of B-, this is likely a decent facility. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Albany. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's report card is its remarkable inspection score, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable grades. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 87.642044 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we anticipated. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.57 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This facility provided just 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, although this nursing home didn't rank well in terms of its nursing hours per resident, it performed much better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average.

Moving on to our last category, this facility was awarded a grade of C in short-term care, which is generally a decent grade. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more critical for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, we found that this nursing home provided respectable levels of physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 35.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.