Denali Center

We also would like to note that this nursing home excelled in our nursing grade. We gave them an A+ in this area. Our nursing rating analyzes a handful of datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in the area. Short-term care scores are vital for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of facilities fared better in this area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 98.77551 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Finally, this nursing home has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. This is one of the few facilities in the state to receive an A- or better in all four categories. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem 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.