Friends Extended Care Center

To pair with a favorable overall score, we gave this place an A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was elite in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Very few nursing homes fared better in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility the nation 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 employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care. This facility was given a very good nursing grade this year, with a grade of B. While this was not as good as several of its other category grades, this is still one of the more favorable grades in this category. Our short-term care grades are probably most meaningful for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.