Extendicare Health Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing ratings are largely based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients at least once a day.

We gave this facility an impressive grade of A for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS 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.

Switching gears to the last area, this nursing home also performed admirably in our short-term care category. We awarded it a grade of A- in that category. This completed truly elite report card. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.