The Waters of New Castle

To pair with its decent overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than its overall rating. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of this nursing home's more favorable category grades was in the category of short-term care. This ended up being its second best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The question is whether this also affected quality of care. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. The nursing score includes a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home did not fare very well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this was this nursing home's worst category grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.