Excell Health Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem 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 nursing home also received an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we awarded them a B+ in that area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. We analyzed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more frequently.

Moving on to our fourth category, we awarded this facility a grade of D in short-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category score. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is considered to be a solid assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.