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. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. When determining a facility's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this facility also received favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our stronger scores in that category, with a grade of B. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this nursing home was given a grade of C in long-term care, which is a respectable rating. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.945946 percent of its residents, which is a very solid percentage. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.