Orchard Post Acute Care

We awarded this nursing home one of our better scores in the area of nursing, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. In determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, with a superb score of A- in this area. Short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this nursing home received just a D in that category. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 95.07042 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

In our final category of inspections, we gave this nursing home just a D. This turned out to be this nursing home's worst grade and it really pulled its overall grade down. Our inspection score is based on the nursing home's inspections. Since the data is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. We would scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home had 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, we also need to point out that this place received large government fines recently of over $100,000. This usually means that a facility's poor track record spanned several years.