Grace Care Center of Olney

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch nursing home also was superb in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A+. Only a small group of facilities performed better in this area. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients even once per day.

The last category we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home was given a better than average nursing rating this year, with a B. Although this isn't quite as strong as some of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our stronger scores in that area. Short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. It does not appear that this facility provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we considered the number of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.