Highland Care Center

Highland Care Center is located in Jamaica, New York. The city has 224,445 people. With an overall grade of C, this is likely a middle of the road nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly much worse places out there. One of the major highlights of this facility's report card is its remarkable inspection reports, which is addressed in the next section.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's better category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 89.44821 percent of its residents. This is slightly lower than we were hoping for. Lastly, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this facility had 2.82 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this wasn't as strong as some of its other scores in this category, this number may be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care. This facility's received a low-end short-term care score where it received an F. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Not surprisingly based on its score in this category, this facility was well below average in one of the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered significantly fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 35 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. This statistic was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

The last area we scored was nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is obviously a significant concern. Nursing scores are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. This place also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This metric helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.