Harbor Hill Center

Harbor Hill Center is one of just two nursing homes in Belfast, Maine. We awarded this nursing home an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top third of all facilities in the country. This is really as good of a nursing home as you'll find. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to faring well overall, this facility received high marks in the area of short-term care as well. As a result, it received our highest grade in that category with an A+. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. This nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a nursing home in this category. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. This nursing home was better than average in this metric with 55.8 percent of its patients able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. When calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides an incredible 5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of that total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next area we scored is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a decent score in this category, with a C. Although this wasn't as favorable as many of this nursing home's other scores, it is nevertheless not a bad grade. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After considering the impressive nursing care provided by this facility, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than many nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.1 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a significantly better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.