Cortland Park Rehabilitation and Nursing Center

Cortland Park Rehabilitation and Nursing Center is an average-sized facility in Cortland, New York. With an overall score of C, this is likely a solid nursing home. This nursing home has some things going for it. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's profile is its exemplary inspection rating, which we will address in the next section.

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's second highest area turned out to be its long-term care score, where it was given a grade of B-. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home provided the vaccine to a relatively low 90.53398 percent of its patients. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of D. The nursing rating considers a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. In addition to its weak nursing hours, this nursing home received suboptimal scores in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We found that more of this nursing home's residents sustained falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this nursing home receiving a poor nursing score.

Turning to the next category, we awarded this nursing home a D for short-term care. This is the facility's worst category score. Our short-term care grades are believed to be more critical for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly based on its score in this category, this facility was subpar in one of the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied significantly fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 43.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. This statistic was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.