Prospect Park Living Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. A deficiency-free inspection report is what we like to see.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. The nursing score consists of a handful of factors, but the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facilities third most favorable category is short-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this area. Our short-term care scores are important for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 3.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

Moving on to the last area, we gave this nursing home a D for our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. Naturally, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade a bit. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 91.96429 percent of its patients. This is a bit less than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.