Forest Hills Healthcare Center

Neither this nursing home's overall grade nor its category scores gave us anything to write home about. This place's best category is nursing, but even there it received just a D. This is still a weak grade. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care score and that actually ended up being its next most favorable score. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Based on its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

As it turns out, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its long-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility gave the vaccine to 96.958176 percent of its residents, which is a very solid figure. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we assessed is inspections. Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive favorable government inspections in recent years. Consequently, we had to give it an F in this category. For places with bad inspection ratings, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This facility had 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, we would like to point out that this facility received significant government fines in recent years totaling more than $100,000. This often signifies that a facility's bad track record has been an issue for multiple years.