Elroy Health Services

This facility's overall score was propped up by the fact that it has received favorable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a B+. This is a much better score than the nursing home's overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an B. Our nursing rating is based on a host of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility also was given a positive short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of B in that area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next category we looked at is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's worst area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Sadly, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. For long-term care residents, the nursing home'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 patients. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.