Harbor Hill Center

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in nursing, where it received an A. There are several datapoints within this category. Most of these factors relate to staffing levels. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A few minor dings are not the end of the world.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility received a dominant score of A in our short-term care category. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is considered to be a fair measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to our last area, we gave this facility a D in our long-term care category. This was the facility's weakest category rating. Nevertheless, we would not focus exclusively one poor score. Our long-term care grade is often used to score a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. One of the data points we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.