Grace Hill Nursing Center

On top of its strong overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our long-term care rating. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed well in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. The nursing grade is based on many datapoints, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, while this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this statistic.

Our last category is short-term care, where we gave this nursing home a C in that area. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.