Ellsworth Health Services

To go along with its great overall grade, we gave this facility an A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this nursing home a score of A- for its short-term care grade. This is a superb rating. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we assessed is long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. While this proved to be its lowest category rating, this is nevertheless a good score. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.