Dexter Living Center

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. For patients seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 89.189186 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a few points below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this facility an A for inspections. Our inspection grades are based on many datapoints located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Our nursing rating is mostly based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B-. While this turned out to be its worst category rating, this is still a middle of the pack score. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.