Seneca Place

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing rating is mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our next category, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. This is a very impressive score. 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 considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 69.42675 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we graded, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this grade, the facility rounded out a straight A report card. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.