Granite Manor

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home has had near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In our final area, this nursing home also was given a first-rate short-term care grade, with a grade of A. This wrapped up an elite report card. Short-term care grades are generally used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.