Hearthstone Health Campus

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically 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. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, we awarded this facility a grade of B+ in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive scores. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more important for individuals in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we looked at is nursing, which is this nursing home's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is obviously very disappointing. There are a host of factors within this grade. Many of the subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.