Staten Island Care Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also was given a favorable long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded them a B in that category, which happens to be one of our better. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 94.89051 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another concern is the F this facility was given in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care scores are critical for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its weak rating in this category, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home offers far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The last category we rated was nursing, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is certainly concerning. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric.