Alaris Health at Castle Hill

On top of earning a great overall score, this nursing home excelled in our shot-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Nursing grades are mostly based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also performed well in the category of inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of B+. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 health or safety. A few minor dings are not something to panic about.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home was given an extremely favorable long-term care rating. Even though this wasn't as strong as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our more favorable scores we offer. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.111115 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.