Gino J Merli Veterans Center

Although we did not have many positive things to say about this place's overall score, it did receive a respectable government inspection report this year. It received a decent grade in this area with a B-. We believe that one of the most important factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. Our nursing grade considers a number of factors. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

This facility's third highest category turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it received a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Moving on to the last area, this facility was awarded a B- for long-term care, which we consider to be a respectable rating. With our long-term care grade, we analyze the amount of care offered by a facility, as well as a handful of qualitative statistics. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 99.625465 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable figure. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.