Monroe Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A-. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category scores was in the category of short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outpaced most facilities in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is often a fair assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that this facility was above average in this metric with 55.8 percent of its residents returning home.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this nursing home received just a D in that area. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 79.5756 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.22 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

The last area we graded is nursing, which proved to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. Our nursing grade includes many subcategories, but the main consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. With just 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.