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.

This nursing home's second best area came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a C. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its long-term care grade, which is not an impressive grade. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 94.3609 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Moving on to the next category, this facility really didn't fare very well in this area either. Due to an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This place fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.