Friends Extended Care Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong facility is that it earned an impressive inspection score. Inspections is its best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A+. Our inspection scores are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our most favorable scores. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively 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 B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Nursing scores are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this subcategory. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients more frequently.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility received a respectable short-term care grade of C. Short-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.