Harris Hill Nursing Facility

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category scores was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 83.72549 percent of its residents. This is somewhat lower than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Switching gears to our final category, we awarded this nursing home a D for our short-term care category. This was the nursing home's weakest category rating. Of course, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile a bit. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more important for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.