Sullivan Rehabilitation and Health Care Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Our inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Surprisingly, we awarded this facility a grade of C for its long-term care score, which really isn't a bad grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. This nursing home's received a bottom of the barrel short-term care score where it received an F. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. With a grade of this caliber in this category, we weren't stunned to find this nursing home was below average in several staffing areas we focus on. The nursing home supplied significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The final area we looked at was nursing. We gave it a lowly F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. There are a number of criteria included in this area. Most of the data points are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.