The Convalarium

Although we gave this nursing home a terrible overall score, we gave it a B for our inspections rating. This is the result of the nursing home receiving a decent inspection report this year. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. 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 deficiencies can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Sadly, this nursing home's second highest score is short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared somewhat poorly. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Considering its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing rating weighs quite a few factors, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was given a poor grade of F in that category. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we looked at. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. We were a bit alarmed this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 82.051285 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.