Gillette Nursing Home

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that category, with an A+. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also fared well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of A- in that area, which happens to be one of our most impressive grades. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 87.5 percent of its patients. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we gave this nursing home an F. This is certainly not one of this facility's better areas. We looked at the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This facility averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored is short-term care, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We gave it an F in this area, which is certainly a major disappointment. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Considering its weak rating in this category, we were not stunned to discover this place provided substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.3 percent of its residents returning home.