Harmon House Care Center

We would like to point out that this facility's inspection grade exceeded its overall grade. This facility earned a B+ in this area, which is a quality score. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores was in the category of short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B+. Our short-term care scores are arguably most meaningful for folks needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Nursing ratings are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final category we assessed is long-term care, which was this facility's worst category. It received an abysmal F for this area, which is certainly a major concern. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 92.82869 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.