Rensselaer Care Center

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection scores are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+ in our short-term care category. This is one of our more favorable grades. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. It does not look like this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Our nursing grade is based on a host of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

The last category we graded is long-term care, which was this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. For residents in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.