Friendship Health and Rehab

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was awarded impressive grades in the category of long-term care as well. As a result, we awarded it one of our best grades in that area with a score of A+. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. One of the datapoints we considered on top of this facility's quality nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.375 percent of its residents. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for seniors. The last datapoint we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 2.37 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. Our nursing grade analyzes many factors, but the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This nursing home provides 4.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is actually better than we expected. In computing our ratings, we add additional weight to hours performed by more highly trained nurses such as registered nurses. Lastly, we turn to some quality-focused statistics in rounding out our nursing ratings. Specifically, we look at the percent of patients who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We gave it an F in this area, which is clearly a bit of a disappointment. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 38.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.