Devonshire Oaks Nursing Center

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our nursing rating consists of a handful of factors, but the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 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 facility 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this facility was given an impressive score of A- in our short-term care category. With our short-term care rating, we endeavor to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The next area we scored was long-term care, in which this facility received a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's weakest score still outperforms most facilities. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.