Elk Haven Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home really excelled in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Very few nursing homes performed more favorably in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. 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 only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. The nursing grade is based on many factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The last area we rated was short-term care, where this nursing home received a B-. Even though this proved to be its lowest category score, this is still not the end of the world. In our short-term care grade, we try to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.