Ditmas Park Nursing and Rehab

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially want to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it was awarded a very positive long-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being its second best category grade. In this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 66.25659 percent of its patients. This is somewhat less than we anticipated. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third highest area we gave this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care ratings are critical for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.

The next area we scored is nursing. This facility was given a grade of C in the area. Our nursing grade consists of many components, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did well in this subcategory. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents at least once a day.