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.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent inspections. We gave it a grade of B+ for that area. Our inspection ratings are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also received a favorable short-term care score. In fact, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this category. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most important for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. 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 is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 97.3607 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid 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 patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.