Aase Haugen Senior Services

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave it a grade of A. Inspection ratings are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. We analyzed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B-. In a long-term care environment, the facility'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. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to our next category, this facility was awarded an acceptable short-term care score. Although this was not nearly as strong as several of its other grades, this is really nothing to be ashamed of. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered 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 residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.