Hickory Ridge of Temperance

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so well is that it was given a very impressive short-term care score. In fact, short-term care is its second best category score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home, which as an area this facility performed much more favorably. It outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation in this area with 69.4 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for patients and the skill levels of the nurses. With 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home surpassed the national average. Lastly, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents sustaining falls leading to major injury, this facility performed better than the national average.

The final category we scored is long-term care. We awarded this facility a solid grade in this area, with a grade of B-. While this isn't as high as a few of this nursing home's other grades, it is still not the end of the world. In determining our long-term care scores, we assess the assistance with daily living received by the facility's patients. After assessing the impressive nursing hours provided by this nursing home, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.13665 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than many nursing homes. The last statistic we looked at is the facility's hospitalization rate. While it had 2.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was not too bad.