Harbert Hills Academy Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a score of A for our long-term care score. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. When determining our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The next category we graded is this nursing home's poorest category. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of C in short-term care. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. We were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this place. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.