Excell Health Care Center

One of the reasons this place is a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In that category, we gave it an A. Inspection scores are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. There are quite a few datapoints included in this category. Most of the factors relate to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is not an impressive total. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients more frequently.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. We gave this facility a D for the area of short-term care, rendering this its weakest category grade. 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. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.