The Five Towns Premier Rehab & Nursing Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection scores account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This facility also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded them a B in that category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.757576 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the average nursing home. This nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. While it had 2.85 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities since it had more complex patients.

We also gave this facility a solid score in the area of short-term care, with a B-. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home is above average in terms of its volume of physical therapy and registered nurse staffing provided to its patients. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. It outperformed the majority of nursing homes in the country in this area with 51.1 percent of its patients returning home. This is a better rate than most facilities.

The next category we looked at is nursing, proved to be this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. This really is one of just a couple of weak links in an otherwise impressive profile. When calculating our nursing ratings, we assess both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. We do not think quantity of care is the reason for this places poor nursing score. With 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home actually surpassed the national average. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.