Dycora Transitional Health - Riverdale

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B for our nursing rating. Our nursing rating considers a host of subcategories. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's second best score is short-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still performed relatively poorly. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is more often than not a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home offers far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We gave it a grade of just D for our inspections rating. One of the more important factors in evaluating inspection reports is deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the severity of those deficiencies. This facility had 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, we also would like to point out that this place was assessed significant government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This generally suggests that a facility's poor performance spanned several years.

The final category we scored was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor grade. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is often a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 64.375 percent of its residents, which is several points lower than we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.