Dunkirk Rehabilitation & Nursing Center

We would like to point out that this nursing home's inspection score exceeded its overall grade. This facility earned a B+ in this area, which is one of our better grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also was given an impressive long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it a B+ in this category, which is one of our better. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 92.8 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we expected but still a decent percentage. Lastly, 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 figure.

This nursing home's next highest category turned out to be short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care grades are likely most critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

The next area we graded was nursing, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in this area. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that so many bed sores could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.