Grimes Center - New Haven

To pair with its excellent overall score, we awarded this facility an A for our nursing rating. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents even once per day.

This nursing home also was awarded a very strong short-term care score. In fact, this is this facility's second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Tallying yet another strong category grade, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The last area we scored was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B. While this is not on par with some of its other scores, it is still a fine grade. For patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the data points we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.