Hallmark Care Center

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Very few nursing homes fared this well in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was elite in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes fared better in this category. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 95.27027 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing score includes a host of subcategories. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we looked at ended up being this nursing home's poorest area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. It does not appear that this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.