New Albany Care Center

With more than 20 options located in Columbus, Ohio, New Albany Care Center is one of the seemingly endless list of possibilities. Sporting an overall score of A-, this nursing home ended up being in a different league than the vast majority of the nursing homes in Columbus. We can't find many negative things to say about this facility. Its grades are as good as they get. If you scroll down, you will see this place's category grades, which are also strong.

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home also was superb in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities fared better in this area. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities with 59.4 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. The nursing rating considers a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is better than the level of care offered by most nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it fared as well as any nursing home the state when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these datapoints as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care, in which this nursing home received a B. Believe it or not, this is this facility's least impressive category. A facility is doing something right when their worst grade still beats out most nursing homes. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.