Forest Hills Center

Although this place's overall grade was terrible, it actually performed pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility's next most favorable score was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 50.526314 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly lower than average. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.

Another concern was the F this facility received in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care grade is often used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. As you might expect, we found that this place provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical nursing home. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next area we looked at was nursing, where this facility was given a very poor score in this category as well. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. We weighed the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.