Sapphire Nursing at Wappingers

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a positive score in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B+ in that area. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 71.111115 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a few points less than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to the category of short-term care, this facility was awarded a grade of just D in this category. Short-term care grades are vital for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. This means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we looked at was nursing, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a D in that category. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.