Dover Center for Health & Rehabilitation

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other achievements is its superb long-term care grade. We awarded them one of our most favorable grades in that area, with a score of A. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.24812 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded them one of our higher grades in that category, with a score of B+. In our short-term care score, we seek to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility's weakest category is nursing, which is the final area we looked at. In this area, we awarded this facility a grade of D. We wanted to point out this potential weak link, however, you should not over-emphasize one bad area either. In computing a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses spend with residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these data points to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.