Arlington Court Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall score, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an A-. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in that category. As it turns out, this wound up being its second best grade. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. To our surprise, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. There are many criteria included in this grade. Most of the criteria relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we assessed is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade in this area as well. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.4 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.