Saratoga Center for Rehab & Skilled Nursing Care

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although 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 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. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received positive short-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in this category, with a grade of B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this subcategory. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

Switching gears to our final area, we gave this nursing home a D for long-term care. This is the facility's least impressive category rating. Unfortunately, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 72.312706 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points less than what we expected. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.