The Friendly Home

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in that area. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Unfortunately, it does not look like we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It performed more favorably than most nursing homes in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.84792 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in computing our rating in this area. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The final category we assessed is short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of B- in that category. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.