Clarkson Community Care Center

One of the many reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical area. Inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this nursing home also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a score of A. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.20635 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. In computing a facility's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses are with residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we assessed was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a strong grade of B. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is more often than not a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.