Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center

This facility received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home fared well in our long-term care category. Indeed, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which turns out to be one of our higher grades. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 41.147537 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a bit lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this facility 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 a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing rating includes several datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home did not perform well. With a rock bottom grade of F in this area, this was notably its worst area. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. It looks like this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the staffing figures we considered. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.6 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.