E W Thompson Health & Rehabilitation Center

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility truly excelled in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This place provides only 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

This facility's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the final area we analyzed. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.9 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below the national average.