Care One at the Highlands

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't consider 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.

Contributing to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also received favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 96.07843 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, where this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This actually was this facility's least impressive area. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our nursing score assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place.