Cortland Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category scores came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility was given its third highest category grade in the area of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a C in this area, which is an acceptable grade. Long-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated just 90.30303 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we scored is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a D in that area. Naturally, this score pulled down the facility's overall grade a bit. When computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This place performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these data points to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.