Golden Age Nursing Home

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out that this facility was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of A-. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 96.350365 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

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 score consists of many components, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we scored was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's worst category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is certainly very disappointing. Our short-term care ratings are probably most meaningful for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home offered less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.