Highland Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for the area of inspections. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. Our short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility is also above average in the area of long-term care, where it was given a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.18841 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's least impressive area was nursing, which is the last area we assessed. For this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. We would like to to draw your attention to this potential weak link, but you should not dwell on one category either. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. While this place didn't excel in the area of nursing hours, it actually surprised us in some of the quality-based assessments in the nursing category, such as avoiding serious falls. This facility was above average in this statistic, which is one redeeming quality we found in this area.