Fifth Avenue Health Care

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for its inspection grade. This is far more impressive than its overall grade. Our inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a strong score in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in that area. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we rated was short-term care, which was this facility's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Naturally, this category pulled down the facility's overall profile a bit. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.