Highland Nursing Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. The nursing rating is based on several subcategories. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we rated was short-term care. In this category, we awarded this facility a decent grade of C. This proved to be this nursing home's worst area. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.