Tekakwitha Living Center

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in this area with a grade of A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our more impressive scores. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. When computing our nursing scores, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

The final category we graded is short-term care, is this facility's worst area. We gave this facility a D in this category. This is one of the couple of weak links on a quality profile. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most important for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.