Grimes Center

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home excelled in our nursing score. We awarded them an A+ in this area. We assessed the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 Connecticut 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 having a policy of turning a resident more frequently.

This exemplary nursing home also performed remarkably in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes performed better in this area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 7.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A for that category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

The final area we scored was long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our better scores in that category, with a B. Although this was not as favorable as some of this nursing home's other grades, it is still an excellent grade. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 93.22034 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.