New Haven Living Center

Although we weren't very high on this place's overall grade, it received an A- in the area of long-term care. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 62.162163 percent of its patients. This is a bit below what we expected. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Surprisingly, this facility actually earned a good score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Few facilities that were this poor overall earned multiple category grades of this caliber. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Unfortunately, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is typically a useful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score in this range for this category, we weren't surprised to find this place was well below average in several staffing areas we looked at. The nursing home provided far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we scored was nursing, where this nursing home received a very poor grade here as well. Sadly, it received an F for this category, which is definitely a major disappointment. In determining a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This place offered just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of its below average nursing hour totals, this nursing home also earned poor marks in some of the quality-based metrics we considered in computing our nursing scores. We found that more of this facility's residents experienced falls leading to major injury.