Gracemore Nursing and Rehab

We also wanted to emphasize that this nursing home earned near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an A+ in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving patients more frequently.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our stronger scores in that area, with a grade of B. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we scored turned out to be this facility's worst area. However, even in its worst category we still gave it an acceptable grade of B- for our short-term care category. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is considered to be a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.