Altoona Health & Rehab

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating features many subcategories. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection ratings are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The fourth category we scored is short-term care, where this nursing home received an A-. This finished off a very favorable profile. Few nursing homes received an A- or better in every single category. Our short-term care ratings are probably more critical for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.