Elizabeth Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this place also earned first-rate government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in this category, with a grade of A-. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. It does not appear that we were able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other accomplishments is its superb long-term care grade. It received one of our best grades in that area, with a grade of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 95 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was short-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the road grade in this category. Our short-term care ratings are likely more meaningful for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

The final category we assessed is nursing. This facility was given a grade of C for this area. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.