Juniper Village at Lincoln Heights

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an A. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing grade is mostly tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it excelled in inspections, with a grade of B in that category. It performed better than most nursing homes in this area. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care. In this area, we gave this facility a solid grade of B-. This is this nursing home's least impressive area. Our long-term care grade is often used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.