Evergreen House Health Center

Evergreen House Health Center is a facility located in East Providence, Rhode Island, which has a population of 21,963 people. Featuring an overall rating of A, this facility is one of the most elite facilities we looked at. Impressively, this grade is even higher than the city grade of A- in East Providence, which is one of the higher rated cities in Rhode Island. Headlining this facility's remarkable profile is its inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given an A+ for its short-term care grade. In computing these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. It outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 63.7 percent of its patients returning home. This is a much better rate than most facilities.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

In the final category we graded, this facility was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this score, the nursing home finished off an elite report card. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.65179 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.65 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.