Elmwood Hills Healthcare Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care grade. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.278625 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another one of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The third category we looked at is short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be more critical for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last area we graded was nursing. This facility was given a better than average nursing rating this year, with a B-. Even though this isn't quite as strong as many of its other category grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable grade for that category. Our nursing score assesses many components, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Lastly, we also considered some quality-based statistics in this category. While this place didn't rank highly in terms of nursing hours, it fared much better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. For example, in terms of the percentage of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is usually an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented with better nursing care.