New London Specialty Care

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in computing our score in this category. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

Surprisingly, we awarded this nursing home a B- for its short-term care score, which isn't a bad grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is typically a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

This nursing home also didn't rate too badly in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a C in that area, which turned out to be another one of its better scores. Long-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 97.4359 percent of its residents. This place keeps 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 number.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. When a place has this poor of an inspection rating, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. This nursing home had 2 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.