High Hope Care Center

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also earned top notch inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our best grades in that area, with an A+. Inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a grade of A for our long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. The nursing score includes several components, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final category we graded was short-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is a poor grade. You shouldn't simply rule out a nursing home as a result of a single poor grade though. In determining these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. It appears that this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.4 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below average.