Capitol Hill Healthcare 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. Inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, it does not look like we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. 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 long-term care grade. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 93.84615 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points below what we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we rated was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care score this year, with a grade of C. Even though this wasn't quite as impressive as a few of its other scores, this remains a decent rating in that category. Short-term care grades are typically used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.