Highland View Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this place also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared better in that category. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not 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 favorable long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category with a score of B+. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 95.333336 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. There are many subcategories included in this grade. Most of these datapoints relate to staffing levels. This facility provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

The last area we rated was short-term care. We gave this nursing home a C in that category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.