Highland Nursing Home

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an B. The nursing rating assesses several datapoints, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B- in this category. In determining our long-term care scores, we analyze the assistance with daily living received by a nursing home's residents. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Unfortunately, this nursing home vaccinated only 90.36144 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to the final category, we awarded this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care. This is the nursing home's weakest category score. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.4 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.