Lutheran Center at Poughkeepsie

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspection category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we rated this nursing home so favorably is that it was given a dominant long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care ended up being its second most impressive category score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a score of A-. Long-term care scores 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 after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 95.34884 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility is also strong in the category of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B. It performed better than most facilities in this area. Our short-term care grades are critical for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. We weren't able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next area we analyzed was nursing. We awarded this facility an acceptable score in that category, with a grade of C. While this was not on par with some of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless not the end of the world. We assessed the levels of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient more frequently.