Rockaway Care Center

Rockaway Care Center is a very-large nursing home located in Far Rockaway, New York. We gave this facility an overall grade of D. A score of this caliber typically suggests a few concerning datapoints. Far Rockaway received a city grade of B-, so there are some other options in the city worth looking at. If you aren't deterred by this facility's profile, you can continue reading to learn more about its category scores. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

One of this nursing home's more favorable category grades came in the area of long-term care. This wound up being its second most respectable category. In that category, we awarded this facility a B-. With our long-term care rating, we assess the sheer volume of services provided by a facility, as well as a few quality datapoints. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.850395 percent of its residents, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the quantity of hours nurses commit to residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than twice the national average in this metric. This is quite concerning when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very weak nursing grade.

Turning to the fourth category, this nursing home didn't perform well in this area either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. With our short-term care rating, we try to craft a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Given its score in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the data we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 21.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.