Cascades at Orchard Park

One of the reasons this proved to be a quality facility is it received a very impressive short-term care score. Short-term care is its best category. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its recent inspections. We awarded it an A- for that category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In computing our nursing ratings, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient more often.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home received a strong long-term care grade in our assessment, with a B-. Even though this is not as elite as many of its other scores, this remains an acceptable rating in that category. With our long-term care assessment, we focus more on the sheer quantity of services provided by a facility, along with a series of qualitative data points. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 98.305084 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.