Grafton County Nursing Home

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. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its fine assessment, this facility also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A-. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country 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 employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care. In this category, we gave this facility an acceptable grade of C. This proved to be this facility's worst area. Our short-term care grade is often used to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.