Altoona Center for Nursing Care

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility outperformed its overall score in the category 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 a grade of A-. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also wanted to note that this nursing home earned an B+ in our nursing category. Nursing grades are mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a resident more often.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest category is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category likely don't provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated only 56.20155 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

The final area we assessed was short-term care. It received an F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is obviously a major disappointment. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Given its score in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.7 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.