Elmwood Terrace Healthcare Center

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually received a very good score in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B for that area, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This nursing home received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's long-term care grade is one of its better grades. The facility was awarded a grade of C in this area. Long-term care grades focus on a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We found that this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 90.18405 percent of its patients, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. On a more positive note, 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 facility's next highest category came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility's weakest category is nursing, which is the final area we assessed. For this category, we gave this facility a D. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.