Deerfield Care Center

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. Consequently, it earned one of our best grades in that category with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place 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 often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded a high-end grade of A- in our short-term care category. In our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like 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 this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the last category, this facility also performed admirably in our long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a B+ in that category. This rounded out a very strong profile. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 95.07042 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.