Singleton Health Care Center

We gave this place one of our better scores in the area of long-term care, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not elite. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.484535 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a D for its short-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is generally a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. It appears that this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we looked at. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last category we assessed was nursing, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a D in this area. Naturally, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this category. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is an alarmingly low total. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.