Lutheran Center at Poughkeepsie

Lutheran Center at Poughkeepsie is a large non-profit facility located in Poughkeepsie, New York. This nursing home received an A- overall, which is a very strong rating. In our view, this place is a no brainer for just about anybody. The best part of this nursing home's strong report card is its inspection grade. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was superb in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 98.59155 percent of its patients. This is a great way to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.22 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a much lower hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Short-term care grades are generally employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This place improved its score in this area by providing more than one and a half times as many physical therapy hours than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes with 61.9 percent of its patients returning home.

The final category we graded is this facility's worst category. Nevertheless, even its lowest point would actually be a highlight for many facilities. We awarded it an above average grade of B in nursing. In determining our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is better than the level of care offered by most nursing homes. Finally, this place was also above average in each of the major quality-based metrics we looked at in this category. For example, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.