Harrogate

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually perfect. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its top-shelf resume, this nursing home also received an excellent short-term care grade, with a score of A. In calculating these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing grade is based on many subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home also performed admirably in our long-term care category. We gave it a grade of B+ for this category. This finalized a very strong profile. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.