Handmaker Home for the Aging

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home earned even higher grades in the area of long-term care. In fact, it earned one of our best grades in that area with an A. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive profile, this facility also performed well in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A-. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. There are a number of subcategories included in this grade. Many of these criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. This facility proved to be very solid in each category we looked at. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.