Shady Lake Nursing Home

This facility received a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we wanted to point out its excellent long-term care rating. We gave them an A+ in this category. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. Inspections turned out to be one of its best category grades. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we have deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Our nursing rating assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

The next area we looked at was short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. It received a lowly F in this category, which is obviously a bit of a concern. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is frequently a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the staffing figures we considered. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.