Arbor Hills Nursing Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed this well in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch facility also dominated in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A+. Only a small group of facilities performed better in this category. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also want to note the fact that this facility was awarded a high-end score of A- in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we scored is nursing, in which this nursing home received a B. While this ended up being its lowest category score, this is nevertheless a quality grade. The nursing rating includes several data points, most of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.