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.

Contributing to its first-rate profile, this nursing home also received a dominant long-term care grade, with a score of A. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.649124 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on our third category, we gave this facility a score of A- for our short-term care rating. This is a very strong grade. Our short-term care grades are important for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of 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. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next category we analyzed was nursing. This nursing home received a favorable nursing grade in our assessment, with a B-. Although this was not nearly as strong as several of its other grades, this remains a decent rating in this area. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.