Apple Rehab Clipper

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with an impressive grade of A. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be more critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.85714 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also performed well in the category of inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of B+. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we looked at was nursing, in which this facility received a grade of B-. Even though this ended up being its weakest category rating, this is still not a terrible score. Our nursing grade considers a host of data points. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its residents.