The Amsterdam at Harborside

The Amsterdam at Harborside is a small nursing home located in Port Washington, New York. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded facilities we assessed. In fact, it was given our most impressive score. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it as one of the 25 best nursing homes in New York. One of the best aspects of this facility's remarkable report card is its short-term care score. We discuss short-term care in the next section.

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In the category of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. This nursing home excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it provided about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is typically a great sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 66.9 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. There are many criteria within this category. Most of the factors reflect staffing levels. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the number of its patients suffering falls leading to serious injury, this place performed as well as any facility the country.

In the last category we scored, this facility received a very favorable grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 95.652176 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.