Villa Scalabrini Special Care

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although 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 means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this nursing home a strong grade in long-term care. This facility earned a B in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable grades. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third category we assessed is short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's least impressive category is nursing, which is the final area we scored. For this category, we awarded this facility a D. Our nursing grade is largely tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility had really bad marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing falls leading to serious injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a poor nursing score.