Seneca Health Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important area. Our inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal 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 patients. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 91.666664 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is a bit lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a score of B. It performed more favorably than most nursing homes in this category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last area we analyzed is this nursing home's worst category. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of C in nursing. In calculating our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did well in this metric. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.