Rinaldi Convalescent Hospital

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other facilities. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

Interestingly, this facility's terrible overall score can't really be attributed to its government inspection reports. We awarded it a C for our inspections rating. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 10 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This indicates it avoided the more ominous categories of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received some government fines in recent years.

We were also pleasantly surprised to learn that this nursing home earned a reasonably solid short-term care grade in our assessment. We awarded it a C in this area. Short-term care grades are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this also impacted quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The final area we analyzed is long-term care. This facility was given a rock bottom grade of F in that category. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.