Buckingham's Choice

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is considered to be a reliable assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation with 71.4 percent of its residents returning home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government 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.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this nursing home received a dominant grade of A- in our long-term care category. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of offering elite levels of nursing care, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This statistic is also far better than the average nursing home. This combination proved to be successful as this place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the last category, this facility was given an extremely favorable nursing score. We awarded it an A- in that area, rounding out a straight A profile. Our nursing rating features a variety of factors. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provided 4.8 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This was one of the higher totals we found. Furthermore, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. In addition to offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the number of its residents suffering falls leading to serious injury, this place performed better than the national average.