South Nassau Communities Hospital T C U

One of the reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important area. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was strong in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Very few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on our next category, this nursing home received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in that area. For residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, we gave this nursing home a A+ for its nursing score. This finished off an elite profile. The nursing score weighs several factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.