East Haven Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more impressive grades. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's 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 patients. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 88.64307 percent of its patients, which is a bit lower than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a F in this area. Our nursing rating consists of quite a few subcategories, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

This nursing home's weakest area was short-term care, which is the final area we scored. Sadly, it received an F for this category. Despite some decent scores in other areas, this grade is still concerning so we would like to to make sure you are aware. In forming our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With its score in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.