Ellsworth Health Services

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its top-shelf profile, this facility also was awarded an excellent long-term care score, with a grade of A. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.85058 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. There are a number of subcategories within this area. Many of the criteria are tied to staffing levels. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

The fourth category we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility was awarded an A-. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or higher in all four categories. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.