Harbours Edge

To pair with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care score. In computing these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS 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.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care rating. This is a dominant rating. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last category we scored, this nursing home was given a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home completed a straight A profile. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.5 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 when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.