Friends Nursing Home

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home earned an A+ inspection grade. This is based on its recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can offer a facility. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its elite resume, this facility also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, it received a grade of A in the category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 84.375 percent of its patients. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also want to note the fact that this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf grade of A- in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for people in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we analyzed was nursing. We awarded this nursing home one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B. While this was not as dominant as a few of this nursing home's other scores, it is nevertheless a positive score. The nursing score considers many factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.