Estelline Nursing and Care Center

To pair with its first-rate overall score, we awarded this facility an A for our nursing rating. When computing our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning patients more frequently.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. It does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very strong long-term care grade. This actually ended up being this nursing home's third best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A-. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In our last category, we awarded this nursing home an A for our short-term care grade. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.