Elberta Health Care

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it received an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections is its best category. In that area, we awarded it an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other accomplishments is its dominant long-term care grade. It received one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 90.39548 percent of its patients. This is a bit less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. Nursing scores are primarily tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This facility fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

This facility's worst category is short-term care, which is the last category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area. Despite some impressive scores in other categories, this grade is nevertheless a bit disappointing so we would like to to draw your attention to it. In forming these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.