The Citadel of Sterling

While we were not very complementary of this nursing home's overall score, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid facilities with too many deficiencies flagged. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Turning to the category of short-term care, this nursing home was awarded just a D in this area. As it turns out, this wound up being one of its better features. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this place offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average nursing home. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

This nursing home's second lowest category was long-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that category. This is a relatively poor score. For patients seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 96.636086 percent of its residents, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The last area we scored is nursing. It received an F for this category, which is a poor score. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its subpar nursing hours, this facility also received suboptimal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We found that more of this nursing home's residents suffered falls which led to serious injury. We would argue that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this place receiving a terrible nursing score.