Putnam Ridge

To go along with its decent overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. This is far better than its overall rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our better scores. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 94.421486 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also gave this facility a decent score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's worst category was nursing, which is the final area we analyzed. In this area, we awarded this facility a grade of D. Our nursing grade is based on a host of data points. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric.