Corrigan LTC Nursing & Rehabilitation

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home also was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a B in this area, which happens to be one of our better. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of C in this category. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The important question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

This nursing home's weakest category is nursing, which is the last area we assessed. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category. Despite several solid grades in other areas, this score is still disappointing so we wanted to point it out. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home averaged just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.