Devonshire Oaks Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its inspections. We gave it an B+ for that category, which is one of our top grades. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services To have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a B. Even though this was not as strong as several of its other scores, it is nevertheless a fine grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.