Delaware Court Health Care Center

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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.

This nursing home's next most favorable area ended up being its long-term care score, where it received a B-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.44752 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. We assessed the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our score in this category. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of D in short-term care, rendering this its worst category grade. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.