Forum at the Crossing

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Short-term care grades are often employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. There are a variety of criteria included in this grade. Most of the subcategories are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state 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 by employing a protocol of turning patients more often.

We gave this facility a grade of A for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home received a better than average nursing rating this year, with a B. While this was not nearly as dominant as several of its other grades, this is still one of the stronger scores in that category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.61905 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.