Cortlandt Healthcare

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A. This is a much better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Additionally, we also wanted to note that this nursing home received favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second highest grade. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this facility a solid grade in the category of short-term care, where it received a B-. In computing these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The final area we graded was nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this facility a D in this area. Of course, this score hurt the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Our nursing category assesses a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to nursing hours. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found this facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.