Casey's Pond Senior Living Community

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. 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 only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this nursing home received a first-rate grade of A in our short-term care category. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most meaningful for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an elite grade of A- for that category. This completed this place's straight A report card. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.