Kendal at Ithaca

Kendal at Ithaca is a small non-profit nursing home located in Ithaca, New York. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded facilities we assessed. In fact, it was given our most impressive score. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top five percent of all facilities in the United States. One of the best aspects of this facility's remarkable report card is its inspection score. We discuss inspections in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies 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 emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This place provides an incredible 4.8 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is often a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls. Many pressure ulcers could be avoided by providing better nursing care and having a system of moving patients more frequently.

Adding to its high-end resume, this nursing home also received a strong long-term care grade, with a grade of A. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 96.49123 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final category, this facility also was given a very strong short-term care score, with a grade of A. This finished off a rare straight A profile. Short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. This facility is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it supplied roughly 1.5 times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 43.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.