Forest Hill Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not 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.

In addition, this facility received high marks in the area of long-term care. Consequently, it received one of our best grades in that category with a score of A+. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 95.945946 percent of its patients, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. The nursing grade includes a handful of factors, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this place got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this statistic. This is typically 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 a resident even once per day.

The last category we looked at was short-term care. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a decent grade of C. This is this facility's weakest area. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is often a meaningful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.