Altercare of Cuyahoga Falls Center for Rehab & Nursin

In addition to earning a great overall rating, this nursing home performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent inspections. In fact, we gave it an A for this area, which is one of our best grades. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category scores came in the category of short-term care. We gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B+. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient more frequently.

The last category we looked at was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in that area. This is not a bad grade in this category. Long-term care grades are used to measure a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated only 86.82635 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.