Dexter Living Center

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this place also performed well in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its elite assessments in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care rating. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we assessed was short-term care, in which this facility received a grade of B. Believe it or not, this was this facility's worst category. A facility could be doing a lot worse when their worst grade still outperforms most other nursing homes. Short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.