The Waters of New Castle

With an address in New Castle, Indiana, The Waters of New Castle is one of five nursing homes in the area. We gave this facility a B- overall, which is a solid grade. This is comparable with the city grade in New Castle, which is a B. Based on our assessment, there are certainly far worse nursing homes out there. One of the best aspects of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection rating, which you can find in the next paragraph.

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with an A. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this facility's better category scores came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is often a useful measure of the facility's rehabilitation. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the majority of facilities with 55.2 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most nursing homes.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of B- in this category. Our nursing grade includes a variety of factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The final category we scored was long-term care. We gave this facility a C in this area. In the category of long-term care, we focus on the quantity of services offered by a nursing home, as opposed to more sophisticated services. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was less favorable. Here we found that this facility had 2.19 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.