Suffolk Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many dominant grades, this facility received a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A- in this category. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.45652 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also was elite in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few facilities received a better grade in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final area we graded was nursing. We awarded this nursing home one of our more favorable grades in this area, with a B. Even though this isn't as dominant as some of its other grades, it is still an excellent grade. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.