The Convalarium

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility's next best score is short-term care, but it still received just a D in that area. This ended up being a well below average score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is typically a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. With a score in this range in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in many staffing figures we assess. The nursing home offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The third area we graded is long-term care. This facility's was given an unfortunate long-term care grade where it received an F. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 41.935486 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

The next category we graded is nursing. This nursing home received an abysmal grade of F in that category. Our nursing grade consists of several subcategories, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these data points. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.