Altercare of Cuyahoga Falls Center for Rehab & Nursin

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in this area with an A-. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facilities next best area was short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

The third category we analyzed was long-term care, where this nursing home received a B- in this category. Long-term care grades are often used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home gave the vaccine to only 81.437126 percent of its residents. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's worst category was nursing, which is the final area we assessed. For this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. When determining a facility's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility offered just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This statistic is well below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.