Golden Age - Inman

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it a grade of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

We also gave this nursing home a positive grade in long-term care. This facility received a B in this category, which happens to be one of our more impressive grades. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 84 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we graded was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

The next category we looked at is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave it a lowly F for this category, which is clearly very disappointing. There are a host of data points within this category. Most of these criteria reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This place fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.