Caring House

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When calculating our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

Another reason we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was given an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as strong as it gets in this category. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.62963 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home received a very strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a straight A report card. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 3.5 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.