North Capitol Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

While we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it earned a relatively impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our more favorable scores in that category with a B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Surprisingly, we awarded this nursing home a C for our short-term care rating, which really isn't too bad of a score. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing rating features many factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our next category, this facility didn't perform very well here either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is really as terrible as it gets. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We found that this facility administered the vaccine to only 61.50235 percent of its patients, which is not a very encouraging sign. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.