Elm Terrace Gardens

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. It doesn't appear that we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was superb in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 18.442623 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a few points below what we expected but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was given a high-end grade of A- in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grades are likely most meaningful for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The final area we analyzed is nursing. We gave this facility one of our higher grades in that area, with a B. Although this was not as strong as many of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless a positive grade. We assessed the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.