Elmwood Care Center

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility excelled in the area of short-term care, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities fared better in this category. Our short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility also performed well in inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It received one of our highest scores in that area with an A-. Few facilities with an overall grade in this range performed this well in multiple categories. Our inspection ratings are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are with patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a D in our long-term care category, making this its weakest category grade. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 97.75281 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.