Helen Hayes Hospital Residential Health Care Facility

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. We weren't able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate nursing home also dominated in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care grades are important for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility provided about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than a typical facility. This is definitely a very favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the nation in this area with 73.5 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Very few nursing homes performed better in this category. For patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. It does not look like this facility submitted information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final area, we awarded this facility an A+ for its nursing grade. This rounded out a very impressive profile. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the number of hours nurses are with residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides an incredible 7.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the nation in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.