Skytop View Rehabilitation Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this facility also received excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best grades in that category, with an A. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for its short-term care grade. In crafting our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care rating. This is a very impressive score. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we graded was nursing, in which this facility was given a C. This actually is this nursing home's weakest category. This is still nothing to be ashamed of. The nursing score includes many factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This place provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.