Morningside Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall rating, this nursing home also earned an A+ inspection score. This is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can offer a facility. Inspection ratings are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

We also want to note the fact that this facility was given a strong grade of A- in our short-term care area. In forming these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In the last category we looked at, this facility was given a very favorable grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home rounded out a very favorable profile. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.