Central Island Healthcare

Central Island Healthcare is the sole option we identified in Plainview, New York. We awarded it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the pack rating. In our view, this facility looks like a solid choice for most people. One of the major highlights of this facility's profile is its exemplary inspection grade, which you can find in the next section.

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a strong long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we gave them a B in that area, which is one of our better. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 95.70662 percent of its residents, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.91 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also was given a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it a B in that area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in New York in this metric with 64.4 percent of its patients returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, which was this nursing home's least impressive area. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is clearly a major concern. There are numerous data points included in this grade. Many of these data points relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this metric.