Walnut Street Terrace Nursing Home

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks in the area of short-term care as well. It received our highest score in that category with an A+. Short-term care grades are typically used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This score is based on the facility's inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the biggest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on our third area, this facility was given a top-shelf long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, this facility also was given a very strong nursing rating, with a grade of A-. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. The nursing grade weighs several factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient at least once a day.