Grace Hill Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility was awarded a dominant grade of A in our long-term care category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also received a favorable short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B+ in this category. Our short-term care ratings are critical for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It does not look like this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next area we scored was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its lowest category grade, this is nevertheless not the end of the world. We weighed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this area. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, while this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of our quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric.