Belknap County Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this place turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. Inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not deem 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.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home excelled in our long-term care category. We awarded them an exemplary score of A+ in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third category we looked at was short-term care. This facility was awarded a very positive short-term care score, with a grade of B+ in this area. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final area we scored is nursing, in which this facility was awarded a B. Although this proved to be its poorest category score, this is still a strong rating. The nursing rating includes several data points, however, the most important one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident more frequently.