Alden Estates of Northmoor

While we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it actually earned a relatively impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that category with a grade of B+. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, 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 place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an D. Nursing scores are largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

Our next area we graded was long-term care, in which this facility received an F. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 98.30795 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we scored was short-term care. This nursing home was given a very poor grade of F in this category. Short-term care grades are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its score in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.