Union City Care Center

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it an A. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor dings aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an B. We assessed the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's third highest area ended up being its short-term care grade, where it received a B-. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care, turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. This really is one of just a couple of weak points of a very solid profile. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.