Helen Hayes Hospital Residential Health Care Facility

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, we were not able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its short-term care grade. In our short-term care category, we strive to create a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Building on its remarkable assessment, this nursing home also received an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A. For patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of A in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home rounded out a straight A report card. The nursing score weighs a handful of components, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.