Halcyon House

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A+ for its long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing rating analyzes several components, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home was given a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category, giving this facility straight A's. Our short-term care grade is often employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.