Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation

Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation is located in Brooklyn, New York, which offers more than 20 nursing homes. Featuring an overall score of C, this is likely a middle of the pack nursing home. This grade isn't too far off the city grade for Brooklyn, which is a B-. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's report card is its exemplary inspection reports, which is addressed in the next section.

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its inspection grade. This score is far better than its overall score. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home's next best area turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a B-. Our long-term care grades are more important for individuals requiring more conventional services associated with personal care. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to just 84.5679 percent of its patients. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.25 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes.

Sadly, this facility's third highest category was short-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this category, it still fared somewhat poorly. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We found that this facility was below average in one of the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well in this area. In fact, we found that just 38.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The last area we rated was nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it an F in this area, which is certainly a major concern. Our nursing rating is based on a host of factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that so many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This metric helped pull down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.