Carleton Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled at short-term care, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care grade is typically used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its recent government inspections. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Pennsylvania in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

Moving on to the final area, this nursing home was given a decent long-term care score. Although this isn't as strong as a few of its other category grades, this is really a middle of the pack score. Our long-term care scores are more meaningful for individuals requiring more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 92.06349 percent of its residents, which is slightly less than we were hoping for. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.