The Residence at Thomas Circle

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. We looked at the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.6 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 avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its short-term care score. Short-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care score. This is a dominant grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 96.969696 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Building on its other impressive category grades, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of B+ for its inspection score. Our inspection ratings are tied to many data points found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have 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. This nursing home was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.