Elsie Gayer Health Care Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. This was one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. There are a number of factors within this category. Most of these subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our fourth category, this facility also performed well in the long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an A- in that category. This completed truly elite report card. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.