Ellis Residential & Rehabilitation Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this place an A+ for our inspection category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite minor. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. There are a host of datapoints included in this area. Most of these subcategories relate to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility was given a strong short-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that category with a grade of B+. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final category we looked at is this facility's poorest category. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still gave it a decent grade of B- for long-term care. Long-term care grades are crucial for patients looking for non-healthcare services such as personal care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.5 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable total. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.