Alexandria Place

One of the reasons this turned out to be a decent facility is it received a very favorable inspection grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also received an impressive long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we awarded it a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next highest category ended up being its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a B-. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is considered to be a meaningful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Moving on to the fourth area, we awarded this nursing home a D for the area of nursing. This was the nursing home's least impressive category grade. Our nursing rating is based on many data points. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. With a meager 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.