Bell Trace Health and Living Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem 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.

Compounding its elite performance in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for its short-term care grade. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a score of B+. It outpaced most facilities in this category. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this facility 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 last area we scored is nursing. This nursing home was awarded a favorable nursing rating in our assessment, with a grade of B. Even though this wasn't nearly as good as some of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of our stronger grades for that area. Our nursing grade analyzes several factors, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.