Rockaway Care Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.115944 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. This place was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 1.44 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we gave this nursing home an F. This is certainly not one of this facility's better areas. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are seeing residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided only 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This place also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign in light of the fact that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing score significantly.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the final area we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category. In spite of some decent grades in other areas, this score is still alarming so we wanted to make sure you are aware. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Considering its poor score in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 33.3 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below the national average.