Cooperstown Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing

Although we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it a B for our inspections category. This score is much more impressive than the place's overall grade. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid facilities that had too many severe deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's next highest area turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Our long-term care ratings are more important for people requiring more traditional services associated with activities of daily living. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 74.63768 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We were surprised to find that this nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our highest grades. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we looked at was short-term care, in which this nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade in this category as well. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is obviously a major concern. Our short-term care grades are presumably more important for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.3 percent of its residents returning home.