Four Seasons Health Care

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless government inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility also excelled in nursing, where it received an B+. Our nursing score is primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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.

The third area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B+. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is typically a fair assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care, turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. This really was one of just a couple of weak links in a quality report card. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 89.090904 percent of its residents. This is several points below what we expected. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.