Harper Mills

It should also be noted that this facility's inspection grade outpaced its overall grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ for its inspections grade, which is a very solid score. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

This nursing home also received a strong grade in our nursing category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in this area. Nursing scores are largely tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provided 4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Roughly one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. These are both impressive figures, which typically corresponds with quality care. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores came in the category of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is generally a useful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. The last item we assessed in this area is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. It performed better than most nursing homes in this area with 50.8 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home was given a decent long-term care grade of C. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to offering solid levels of nurse staffing, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.14644 percent of its residents. This statistic is higher than the average nursing home. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Although it had 1.96 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities since it had some more complicated patients.