Elmwood Hills Healthcare Center

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this nursing home also received top notch inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our best grades in this category, with a grade of A+. Inspection scores are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

Among this facility's other strengths is its superb long-term care grade. It received one of our better grades in that area, with a score of A-. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 93.52751 percent of its residents. The last datapoint we looked at is the facility's hospitalization rate. Although it had 2.15 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was close to the national average since it had more complex patients.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home averages 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Finally, while this nursing home didn't rank well in terms of its nursing hours, it performed better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average.

Turning to the fourth category, we gave this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. This was the facility's worst category rating. Of course, this grade pulled down the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 44.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.