The Waters of New Castle

Although we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a grade of B+. 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. It is typically best to avoid places that had too many severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Moving on to the area of short-term care, this nursing home received a grade of just D in that category. Sadly, this ended up being one of its better features. Our short-term care ratings are probably more critical for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Based on its score in this area, we were not stunned to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Finally, we considered the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Unfortunately, we gave this facility an F for its long-term care score. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 97.413795 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The final area we scored is nursing, where this facility was given an abysmal grade in this area also. We gave it an F for this category, which is definitely very concerning. Our nursing score assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This place averaged a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.