Bedford Hills Center

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an A in this category. Our nursing grade includes a host of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Facilities that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our better grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 86.07595 percent of its patients. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last area we assessed is short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable score in that area, with a B-. While this isn't as strong as several of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a major area of concern. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is more often than not a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.