Jewish Home of Central New York

Although this facility's overall score was not a highlight, it did receive a very good grade in the category of inspections. We gave it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have too many severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the pack grade in the area of short-term care, with a grade of C. Our short-term care grades are considered to be most important for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its long-term care rating, which is not an impressive grade. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Moving on to the last category, we awarded this nursing home a D in our nursing category. This was the nursing home's worst category rating. Our nursing grade consists of quite a few subcategories, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This facility averaged only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.