Henry J Carter Skilled Nursing Facility

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. Our inspection grades are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was given an elite grade of A- in our long-term care category. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 90.9864 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility is also strong in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outpaced most facilities in this area. Short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Moving on to our last area, this facility received an extremely favorable nursing score. While this was not nearly as impressive as some of its other scores, this is still one of the stronger scores a facility can receive. There are quite a few criteria included in this category. Many of these factors are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients at least once a day.