Hales Corners Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. Our nursing score focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility 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.

Among its many elite scores, this nursing home was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a score of A in this category. In forming our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In addition, this facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The last area we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a better than average nursing grade in our assessment, with a B. Although this is not nearly as good as some of its other category grades, this remains one of the more favorable scores for this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.