Dexter Living Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. When calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 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 place 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 wanted to point out the fact that this facility was superb in our long-term care category. We awarded them a dominant grade of A+ in this area. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.05556 percent of its patients, which is a bit less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this facility 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 an impressively low figure.

We gave this nursing home a score of A for inspections. Our inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem 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.

In our final category, this facility also was given an impressive short-term care grade, with an A-. This finished off a straight A report card. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is considered to be a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.