Care One at Redstone

One of the reasons this proved to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care rating. In fact, short-term care turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A-. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most meaningful for those requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's government inspections. We gave it an B+ for that category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of B. It outpaced most nursing homes in this category. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.13793 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we graded was nursing. In that area, we gave this facility an impressive grade of B. Our nursing score weighs numerous factors. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.