Seneca House

Although we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we gave it an A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. Our inspection scores weigh a host of 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. You should avoid facilities with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. 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. In spite of this deficiency, this place still had a relatively positive report.

This facility's next most favorable category is long-term care, but it still earned a grade of just D in that area. This still happens to be a relatively poor grade. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 97.53695 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable statistic. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The next category we graded is short-term care. This facility's received a poor short-term care score where it received a lowly F. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

The next area we analyzed was nursing. This facility was given an abysmal grade of F in that area. The nursing rating weighs many factors. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility averaged a meager 0 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that so many bed sores could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.