Eunice C Smith Nursing Home

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home received even higher grades for short-term care. It earned one of our highest scores in that category with a score of A-. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is frequently a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. It outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 64.2 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to another one of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection score. Inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. We gave this nursing home an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. The nursing grade weighs numerous datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This was one of the more impressive totals we found. Furthermore, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls resulting in major injury, this nursing home performed as well as any facility the nation.

The next area we looked at was long-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is clearly a bit of a concern. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. Even though we determined this facility had an above average quantity of nursing care provided by nurses aids and other nursing staff, we found its vaccination rate to be somewhat lower than we expected. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 80 percent of its residents. This is one figure we would like to see this facility improve on. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.61 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.