Dexter Health Care

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Inspection scores are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility truly excelled in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Only a select group of nursing homes performed more favorably in this category. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 93.79845 percent of its patients, which is slightly lower than we expected. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best area ended up being its short-term care grade, where it received a grade of B-. Short-term care scores are critical for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.

The final category we looked at is nursing. In this category, we awarded this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This is this facility's least impressive area. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.