A.O. Fox Hospital

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received top notch inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in this category, with a grade of A. Our inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider 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 facility also was awarded a strong long-term care score. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.42857 percent of its patients, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to our next area, this facility also received a grade of B for its short-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for patients in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Our last area is nursing, where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in this area. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.