Carington Park

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than its overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't 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 always a good sign.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was given strong long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.67846 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Next we wanted to quickly point out one of this facility's major weaknesses. In the area of nursing care, we gave this nursing home a lowly grade of F. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Switching gears to the next category, this facility really did not perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this is this nursing home's poorest area. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is frequently a useful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score this poor for this area, we were not shocked to find this nursing home was below average in several staffing figures we looked at. It provided substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.