Harrison's Crossing Health Campus

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was awarded a positive short-term care score. In fact, we awarded them a B+ in this area, which is one of our better. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of B- in this category. We analyzed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this statistic. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.

The final category we rated was long-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's worst category. It received a lowly F for this category, which is clearly a major disappointment. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.