Emerald Trace

One of the many reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top-shelf facility also fared very well in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Very few nursing homes performed better in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Switching gears to our final area, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A- for this category. This topped off truly elite report card. Short-term care grades are generally employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.