Harmon House Care Center

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. This grade is better than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of B-. Nursing grades are mostly tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The third category we graded is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B- in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we scored was long-term care. This nursing home was given a very poor grade of F in that area. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category may not provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities offer. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 93.56223 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is a few points less than we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.