Bancroft Convalescent Hospital

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this facility also received an elite long-term care score. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with an A+. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.17355 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed at a high level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. There are many factors within this grade. Many of these factors reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care. We awarded this facility a D for our short-term care category, leaving this as the nursing home's worst category. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. In this facility's case, we found that it offers less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.