Ambassador Healthcare

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this facility was given strong long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second best grade. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 94.76923 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses are with residents and the level of skill of the nurses. 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. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last category we scored. It received an abysmal F for this category. Despite multiple solid grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless disappointing so we wanted to make a note of it. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. In this place's case, it looks like it provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.