Draper Rehabilitation and Care Center

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent short-term care grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. In calculating these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that 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. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In determining our nursing scores, we factor in both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we looked at is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a D in the area of long-term care, leaving this as the facility's worst category grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.