Christwood

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no 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 safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing ratings are largely associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 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 nursing home the country 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 having a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

This nursing home also was awarded a first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be this facility's third most impressive category score. In that category, this facility received a score of A. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of A-. This topped off an elite profile. Not many facilities received an A- or higher in every single category. Short-term care grades are generally employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.