Bell Trace Health and Living Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care score. With our short-term care assessment, we strive to create a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility was given a strong long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area with a score of B+. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we scored was nursing. We awarded this nursing home a decent grade in that category, with a C. While this wasn't as dominant as many of its other grades, it is still a middle of the pack score. We weighed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a low total compared with most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.