Hempstead Park Nursing Home

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Remarkably, we gave this facility a grade of B- for our long-term care score, which isn't too bad of a score. Long-term care scores are crucial for residents requiring non-healthcare services such as personal care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 75.47847 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We were surprised to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. We gave it a score of D for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our nursing score includes numerous subcategories. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care, in which this facility received a rock bottom score here also. It received a lowly F for this category, which is definitely very concerning. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this facility offers significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.