Gracedale - Northampton County

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

We also awarded this nursing home a strong grade in long-term care. This facility received a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our better scores. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 95.16635 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. We analyzed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most facilities. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more often.

Switching gears to the next area, this facility really didn't fare very well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is this nursing home's poorest area. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. It appears that this nursing home was subpar in many staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.3 percent of its residents returning home.