Allay Health and Rehab

While we didn't give this place a good overall score, we did give it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it received a B. Inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities with severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. Unfortunately, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which was unexpected given its inspection score. This category of deficiency indicates CMS identified a widespread deficiency placing patient health or safety in immediate danger. While other aspects of this nursing home's inspection report were favorable, we have some reservations.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an C. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did well in this statistic. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a resident more often.

This facilities next best area was short-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is essentially a middle of the road score in this category. Short-term care grades are often used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.

The last category we graded is long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in that category. Nursing homes that do not score well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 77.6699 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit lower than what we expected. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.