Elm Heights Care Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing grade consists of many datapoints, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients more often.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility also performed well in the short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a B+ for this category. This rounded out a very strong report card. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.