Altercare Post-Acute Rehab Center

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few places fared as well in this area. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate deficiency data for this nursing home. We would like to have more information about this facility. Without having access to the information regarding deficiencies, it was a challenge to really grade this nursing home in this area.

Contributing to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for the category. In computing these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. The nursing score is based on quite a few components, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a resident even once per day.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. In this area, we awarded this facility a decent grade of B-. This actually was this nursing home's least impressive area. Our long-term care grade is used to assess a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.