Carroll House

On top of being a strong facility overall, this nursing home really excelled in our inspections category, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in that category. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. In determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B. Short-term care grades are typically employed to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Switching gears to the next area, this facility received a highly favorable long-term care score. This nursing home didn't turn out to have any weak categories. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. 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 a remarkably low figure.