Northgate Health and Rehabilitation Center

Although we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a fairly impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that category with a B+. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have too many deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility's second best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. When computing our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best score was long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.19101 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we graded is short-term care, in which this facility received a very poor score in this category as well. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is obviously a major concern. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a score in this range in this category, we were not shocked to find this nursing home was below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. In fact, it supplied substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.