Aristacare at Norwood Terrace

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for that area, which is one of our highest grades. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't 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.

This nursing home also received a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our higher grades in that area with a score of B+. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.2278 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we assessed is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is clearly somewhat disappointing. There are a variety of data points within this category. Many of the criteria relate to staffing levels. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.