Fircrest School, Pat N

We also found that this facility excelled in long-term care. We awarded them a grade of A+ in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 95.08599 percent of its residents, which is better than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A. The nursing rating includes several datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Tallying another strong category grade, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This particular nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the final category we assessed, this nursing home received a very favorable grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home completed a first-rate report card. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is generally a reliable assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.