Estelline Nursing and Care Center

We also wanted to point out that this facility has received near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its top-shelf achievements in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A- for its long-term care grade. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient at least once a day.

In the last category we assessed, this facility was awarded an impressive grade grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home wrapped up a very favorable profile. Short-term care scores are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This includes a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.