Gilpin Hall

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in nursing. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Delaware in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a patient more frequently.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also was given a dominant short-term care score. In fact, this is this nursing home's third strongest category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. With our short-term care grade, we try to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In our final category, this nursing home also received an impressive long-term care rating, with a B+. This rounded out a very strong report card. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 96.5812 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.