Unity Living Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our better scores. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.82151 percent of its residents. This is somewhat lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this nursing home's third best category is short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.1 percent of its patients returning home.

The next area we assessed was nursing. We awarded this facility a grade of D in our nursing category, rendering this the facility's worst category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing score significantly.